As I write these words, “What’s Your Future Worth?” is about to be available for purchase. For me, this is the culmination of 3 years of writing, editing, talking, thinking and hoping. I have been advised by people who know far more about these things than me that I need to put up a new post to this blog to mark the occasion and so for the last couple of hours I have been perusing the anecdotes that were left out of the book for one that might be appropriate for the occasion.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find one, in part because despite all the thinking and all that I wrote about it in the book itself (step 2 of the Present Value process is “imagine the future”), this was a future that I simply couldn’t envision back when I started writing down some musings every morning; musings that ultimately became “What’s Your Future Worth?”. In fact, most of what I have written, (and will include in future blog posts) is quite specific and very much focused on different aspects of either the actuarial perspective or how to apply Present Value to make better decisions.

Today, however, I want to talk more about why I think “What’s Your Future Worth?” is a worthwhile investment of your time and your money. And while what I am about to say can be appreciated by anyone, I want to direct this post to a particular audience. Specifically I want to speak to my friends in the corporate world who are responsible not only for decisions made by their organizations as entities unto themselves, but also to those who are responsible for decisions that affect the financial well-being of the employees who work for those corporations.

Corporations get a bad name these days, and I fully understand why. Notwithstanding the snide comments that we hear every day (e.g. “Don’t be mean, after all, Corporations are people too”) there is tremendous prejudice against the motivations and ultimate agendas of corporations. I confess that I am not immune from such feelings, but I also want to say that some of my best friends are corporations. I mean that sincerely. In a very real way I feel not only close to many of the individual clients that I have worked with over the years, but also am not ashamed to say that I genuinely like some of the companies they work for. More to the point, I think most corporations have both good intentions and a dark side. It is those good intentions and that “better nature” that I think my book speaks to and for which the actuarial perspective can be extremely useful in providing the means that corporations can use to help improve the world.

At the end of the day, what is a corporation after all? The way I look at it, a corporation is a living entity whose cells are made up of human beings and one whose lifespan is a little (sometimes a lot) longer than ours. Perhaps there is no “soul” within a corporation, but as individual cells, how would we even know if there was one? What is clear, however, is that corporations make decisions and those decisions have future consequences – both for themselves as well as the people who work within them and interact with them. Despite the conventional wisdom that companies only seek “profit maximization”, I think that corporations can and do take into account much much more when they make decisions. Like people and their decisions, the future DOES matter to a corporation and the process they (should) use to evaluate the consequences of those decisions could benefit tremendously from considering Present Value.

I spoke earlier about how we can think of a corporation as a complex multi-cellular organism whose cells are individual human beings. If so, it seems self-evident to me that such an organization should do everything it can to help those cells thrive and be healthy; physically, emotionally and financially. In fact “Financial Wellness” is a buzzword these days and many firms (mine included) are seeking ways to help their employees become financially more healthy by designing compensation and benefit programs that maximize benefits (as valued by the employee) at the minimum possible cost to the employer. This is all well and good, but the fact is that the corporation will never know all they need to know about an employee’s total financial situation to make all the right decisions on their behalf. Even more importantly, the corporation will never know the hopes, dreams, plans and values of each of their employees. At the end of the day it’s the individual employee who has to make the right decision, and the best the employer can do is to design programs that empower and equip those employees to make the right choices to ensure their financial health.

“What’s Your Future Worth?” is a book that will show both corporations and the employees who make them up how to make the decisions that will lead to better futures for everyone, and I truly hope all of you choose to read it.

I am not a salesman at heart and I promise this is the last pitch you will get from me. From now on this blog will only be about Present Value, the actuarial perspective and/or how both can help make the world a better place.