Original publication date: March 31, 2016

Key takeaways:

• Sports culture has conditioned fans to think about success in one-year increments. However, investors, unlike sports fans, don’t start from zero at the beginning of each year.
• In investing, the best performers are those who perform above average, even if not spectacularly so, year-in and year-out with few if any poor years.

Major League Baseball’s 2016 season starts on April 3, and with it the hopes of every team’s fans for a World Series championship. Spring is when fans of last year’s losing teams such as the Philadelphia Phillies (99 losses last year), the Cincinnati Reds (98 losses) and the Oakland Athletics (94 losses) can erase the memories of last year and start at 0-0 like everyone else. As a sports fan and an investment manager, I’ve often thought about what constitutes excellence in both disciplines. My inner sports fan has been conditioned since childhood to think about baseball and other team sports as one-year contests of superiority. The teams play their regular season schedules, with the best among them moving into a playoff, and the winners of that playoff meeting in a championship game or series. The championship winner claims the bragging rights for that season, everyone rests for several months, and the next year the cycle repeats starting with a clean slate.

Photo Source: MorningStar Senior Living

The First Email

The first step on my senior living learning journey happened in January of this year. I was surprised to find myself bcc’d on an email from my client, Mrs. Li, to her daughter in law. The email read:

Dear Heather,

I looked in Atria New York City you mentioned now I heard that you will stay in New York after retirement. It starts from the active living then goes to assisted living and then "memory care." It sounds good. I asked for more info. It does not seem to require to put down a million dollars (like the one I just visited, [a community in Maryland], that they say they will return it at the end). It starts with a rental money of the smallest unit for $7,101/month. When I read the info they will send me, I will know more. It must have a catch to reserve.

Coming to me as it did without any context of the conversation that preceded it, this message triggered a flurry of questions in my mind. Is Mrs. Li thinking of moving to a retirement home? Where did this idea come from? Is she going to ask me to come up with a million dollars in cash sometime soon? Is she instead going to need $7,101 per month, plus annual rent increases, for the rest of her life? The biggest question to me, though, was why on earth Mrs. Li was worried about any of this.

After sharing A Senior Living Learning Journey with you, I really wanted to quickly deliver a series of short, highly readable, informative articles and stories to help you understand and navigate the senior living landscape as I come to understand it. My perspective is shaped by dual roles: as an investment manager for seniors and their adult children, and as a son of divorced, remarried parents with a personal interest in the end-of-life care of four family members in their mid-seventies and older. As I deepen my research, however, I am finding that even some of the more basic senior living questions defy quick, breezy explanations. Treating the subject and the issues fairly and usefully simply requires more time, space, and depth of research than I first imagined. As time consuming as it can get, every hour I spend on the topic and every interaction I have with clients, family, friends and readers, I find myself increasingly convinced of its importance. Meanwhile, I also find myself feeling more surprised, confused and puzzled by the complexity of the industry. I am turning into two selves - an investment manager self and a concerned son self.