Show Notes
The investments you own may be perfectly reasonable—and still be completely wrong for you.
In this episode of 20/20 Money: The Business of Optometry, I'm joined again by Peter Lazaroff, Chief Investment Officer at Plancorp and author of The Perfect Portfolio: A Proven Guide to Smart Investing for Long-Term Success, for a conversation about what actually makes an investment portfolio "perfect."
We discuss why portfolio construction has to begin with the investor rather than the investments, why simplicity is valuable but shouldn't become an ideology, and how to evaluate whether added complexity is actually solving an important problem. Peter shares a four-question framework for evaluating new investments, explains the difference between owning an index and following an indexing philosophy, and walks through why rules-based investing can look very different from simply buying an S&P 500 fund or target-date fund.
We also revisit direct indexing and the role tax-loss harvesting can play for business owners, particularly those who may eventually realize a significant capital gain from the sale of their practice. From there, we explore stocks versus bonds, the different ways investors should think about risk, and why reducing short-term volatility can sometimes introduce a different kind of long-term risk.
Most importantly for optometric practice owners, we discuss why your investment portfolio cannot be evaluated in isolation. Your practice is an asset on your personal balance sheet. Its cash flow, value, concentration risk, liquidity, insurance needs, and eventual sale should all influence how you think about the rest of your wealth.
Peter's central point throughout the conversation is a useful one: there may not be a universally perfect portfolio, but there can be a portfolio that is appropriate for you, your goals, your behavior, and the entirety of your financial life.
NBS (Next Best Step): Look beyond your brokerage and retirement accounts and create a complete picture of your personal balance sheet. Include the value of your practice, cash, real estate, retirement accounts, taxable investments, and other meaningful assets. Then ask yourself whether those pieces are working together intentionally—or whether you've been making investment decisions one account at a time.
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More from 20/20 MONEY: The Business of Optometry
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The most expensive mistake in your practice might be solving a problem you never proved existed.
You may feel diversified while quietly becoming more dependent on the exact same sources of wealth. In this episode of 20/20 Money: The Business of Optometry, I explore concentration risk from two angles that practice owners often don't connect: what's happening inside an investment portfolio and what's happening on their personal balance sheet as their practice becomes more valuable. We start with the S&P 500. Because the index is market-cap weighted, the companies that perform best naturally become larger portions of the index. Today, the largest companies represent a significantly greater share of the S&P 500 than they have historically. That doesn't make the S&P 500 a bad investment, but it does challenge the idea that simply owning VOO means you've built a complete, diversified portfolio. "VOO and chill" is an implementation strategy. It isn't an investment philosophy. The same phenomenon can happen with a successful optometry practice. You may never intentionally decide to put the majority of your net worth into one business. You simply grow a great practice. But over time, your income, distributions, enterprise value, and perhaps even your real estate can all become dependent on the same economic engine. Having a high net worth isn't necessarily the same thing as having diversified wealth. The solution isn't to stop growing the practice or abandon the S&P 500. It's to broaden the sources of your wealth. That means consistently harvesting excess cash flow from the practice and investing it outside the business while building a portfolio that captures more than just one segment of the market. We also discuss why this matters enormously when it comes time to sell your practice. The more financial independence you've created outside of the business, the less dependent you become on receiving a specific number or specific terms from the eventual sale—and the more optionality you have when navigating that transition. The Next Best Step: look underneath both sides of your balance sheet. Ask yourself how diversified your investment portfolio really is, what percentage of your family's net worth depends on the success of your practice, and whether you're intentionally becoming more diversified over time—or simply becoming more concentrated in whatever has worked recently.