The sand that runs is not wasted

There is an hourglass at the center of our firm's identity. Not as decoration. As doctrine. It is a reminder that time is the only asset that cannot be replenished, diversified, or passed from one generation to the next unchanged.

A few years ago, I lost three people close to me in the span of a few months.

One was the mother of my closest friend. A woman deeply rooted in her family and her community. I was lucky enough to share a glass of scotch and a lot of laughs with her over the years. Another was a woman I'd grown up calling "Mom #2," the mother of my best friend from my Texas childhood. Gone a couple of months before that. And then a man who had been part of my parents' world for decades, someone I used to trade fantasy football trash talk with every fall. He passed away just months after his wife did.

All three shaped me in ways I probably can't fully account for. All three gone within the same year.

I wrote to my clients about it at the time because I couldn't not. I've never been able to keep a clean wall between what's happening in life and what I talk to clients about. That's not accidental. It's the whole point.

What I wrote then, and what I still believe, is this: memento mori. It's a Latin phrase the Stoics lived by. The literal translation is "remember that you will die." Roman generals returning home from victory had a slave ride beside them in the triumph parade, whispering it in their ear. Not as a taunt. As a gift. Because the person who genuinely reckons with their own mortality doesn't squander their afternoon. They don't defer the most important conversations to next quarter. They don't mistake being busy for having a purpose.

I'm not trying to be morbid. I'm trying to make an argument. Because I think this idea sits at the center of what we actually do at Benda & Co., and most people in my industry never quite get around to saying it plainly.

The hourglass

I've had a version of the same conversation hundreds of times. A client sits down, we talk about what they want retirement to look like, what they want their wealth to do. At some point I ask them a question that isn't in any standard financial planning playbook: not what rate of return they're targeting, but what they actually want their money to mean.

The room gets quiet in a particular way when I ask that. It's a good kind of quiet. It's the sound of someone realizing that nobody has ever asked them that before.

What strikes me about an hourglass, when I really sit with it, is not that the sand is disappearing. It's that it's going somewhere. Every grain that passes through the narrow center arrives, without exception, on the other side. The sand that runs is not wasted. It lands. It accumulates. It takes a shape.

The question that actually matters is not how much sand you have left. It's what shape does it take when it lands.

The measure of a life well lived is not what you accumulated while the sand was falling. It is who was standing beneath the glass with you.

Where "live life to the fullest" goes wrong

There's a version of this idea that's been quietly hijacked by individualism. Travel more. Experience more. Accumulate more. And look, I am not the guy who tells you those things are bad. Travel is great. I recommend it. I've taken my share of long weekends and I'll take more.

But if the fullness of a life is measured only by the richness of your own experience, then when the hourglass empties, it serves exactly one person.

I've sat across from a lot of clients over the years. Families who built extraordinary things: businesses, portfolios, reputations that outlast any single career. And the pattern I keep seeing is this: the most satisfied people I've worked with are not the ones who consumed the most. They are the ones who poured themselves into something that outlasted them.

That's not a moral judgment. It's an observation about what actually produces the feeling that a life was well spent. I see it consistently enough now that I've stopped thinking it's a coincidence. The people who feel most at peace about their wealth are the ones who know what it's for.

The book that shaped how I think about my job

I've recommended Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven to more clients than I can count. I tell people it's the inspiration for how I think about this work. I mean that more literally than it might sound. This isn't a book recommendation at the end of a newsletter. It's the reason I do this job the way I do.

If you haven't read it: the book follows Eddie, a maintenance worker at a seaside amusement park who dies in an act of self-sacrifice and arrives in heaven to meet five people he never expected. Each one had been changed by his life in ways he never knew. Some he helped. Some he had harmed without realizing it. Some he had loved and lost. All of them were necessary for him to understand what his life had actually meant. And it was almost nothing like what he had assumed.

Eddie spent his whole life believing he had never escaped the park. That it had confined him. What he didn't know was that the park was the point. The place he thought had held him back was actually where his life had touched others most deeply.

Maybe the same is true for all of us. The work, the relationships, the conversations we thought were ordinary. The five people are already out there. We just can't see them yet.

That's the part that holds me: you do not know who you are helping while you are helping them. You don't see the ripple from where you're standing. The grain of sand passing through the narrow center of the hourglass doesn't know where it's going. It only knows that it is going.

Purpose rarely announces itself. It tends to arrive in retrospect, like the five people at the end of the story. Which is exactly why the only sensible response is to act with intention now, while the sand is still falling.

What this actually means for your legacy

This is the part where I talk about estate planning. And I will, because the structures matter and I take them seriously.

Trusts, entities, charitable vehicles, generational transfer planning that keeps the government from becoming the principal beneficiary of a lifetime of disciplined accumulation: that work is essential and we don't apologize for its technical rigor. Getting the architecture right is part of how we show up for the people we work with.

But the most important conversation we have is never about the vehicles. It's about the destination.

Who are the five people your wealth will actually reach? Not necessarily the five names on a beneficiary form, though that's a place to start. I mean: who are the institutions, the causes, the grandchildren not yet born who will be shaped by decisions you're making right now, today, while you're still here to make them with intention? The hourglass doesn't care about internal rate of return or stepped-up basis. But you do, because you understand that the sand matters when it lands.

Seneca wrote that we are not given a short life. We are given a long one that we waste. The cure is not urgency for its own sake. It is attention to what the life is actually for. It is asking, clearly and without flinching, who benefits from the fact that you were here.

Wealth, when it is only preserved, is merely stored time. When it is given to a child, to a cause, to a future you will not live to see, it becomes something else entirely. It becomes proof that you were here.

Our firm was built on a single belief: private wealth, managed with intention, is one of the most powerful instruments of human agency in existence.

It can outlast the person who created it by generations. It can alter the arc of a family, a school, a community. It can reach people whose names you will never know: your own five strangers, waiting at the end of someone else's story.

Remember that you must die. Let that remembrance clarify, not paralyze. Let the hourglass remind you not to fear the sand, but to be deliberate about where it falls.

Because it is going somewhere. It always is.

Chris Benda, Founder, Benda & Co.

Chris Benda is an investment adviser representative with Savvy Advisors, Inc. (“Savvy Advisors”). Savvy Advisors is an SEC registered investment advisor. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the speakers and authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Savvy Advisors. Information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but are not assured as to accuracy.

Material prepared herein has been created for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation. Information was obtained from sources believed to be reliable but was not verified for accuracy.‍Savvy Wealth Inc. is a technology company. Savvy Advisors, Inc. is an SEC registered investment advisor. For purposes of this article, Savvy Wealth and Savvy Advisors together are referred to as “Savvy”. All advisory services are offered through Savvy Advisors, while technology is offered through Savvy Wealth. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the speakers and authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Savvy Advisors.