Last week I asked how many months your runway would give you in a bad year. Here’s a different kind of accounting, and this one is measured in hours.
Count the time you spent last month coordinating your own advisors and reviewing your plan. Relaying what the CPA said to the attorney. Explaining the deal timeline to the money manager. Forwarding documents. Chasing answers.
Sitting in the middle of a conversation that should have happened without you.
For most successful families it’s more hours than they’d guess — and they’re done by the person with the most to lose and the least time to spend.
The hours are the cheap part
Those hours aren’t made of just time. They’re made of judgment — and most people have less of that in a day than they think. Every relay between two advisors, every status chase, every “wait, does the money manager know about the deal timeline?” draws from the same limited supply as the decisions that actually shape your exit.
You end up paying for integration twice. Once in hours. Once in the quality of the decisions that had to share a brain with the coordination.
A job you never signed up for, billed in the currency you can least afford.
Why liquidity lives here too
This is a coordination problem, but it shows up as a liquidity problem more often than people expect.
The cash that should have been staged for a downturn doesn’t get staged, because staging it requires the CPA, the money manager, and the banker to agree on a sequence — and nobody owns scheduling that conversation. So it stays on the list. It stays on the list for years.
The decisions that fall between advisors aren’t random. They’re the ones that need more than one advisor to make, which is another way of saying they’re the ones that matter most near an exit.
This week’s tool: The Coordination Ledger
Two columns, one page. On the left, every hour you spent last month on advisor coordination — estimate honestly, and include the mental drafting you did in the car. On the right, the decisions that didn’t get made last month because they needed two advisors in a room or on the phone
The left column is the visible cost. The right column is the real one.
Write both. The second list is usually shorter and more expensive than the first.
The Next Step
If the right-hand column has anything on it — especially something that’s been there more than a year — that’s not a discipline problem. It’s a structural one, and it doesn’t resolve by trying harder.
A Freedom Audit is a focused 30-minute conversation that puts a name on every decision in your countdown. Schedule yours this quarter.