Timely Topics

Updates and reminders that may impact your personal financial planning

Changes to USPS Postmark Dates

As of December 24th, 2025, the United States Postal Service (USPS) changed the process for postmarking letters and packages. Now, rather than being postmarked when a piece of mail is collected from a mailbox, the postmark reflects the date the mail is processed at a postal facility. This is important to bear in mind for deadline-driven mail as we are approaching tax season. If you need a piece of mail to have a same-day postmark, you can mail it at the post office counter and request a same-day postmark.

Turning the Last Page

Thoughts on a recent read, reviewed by: Brett
Not intended as personal financial advice.

The Aspirational Investor by Ashvin B. Chhabra

For the last three years, I’ve had the pleasure of being an advisory board member of a financial technology startup. It’s been an enjoyable side project that has allowed me to meet some interesting people, including Ashvin B. Chhabra. Ashvin is the former Chief Investment Officer of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management. During a working session with Ashvin, I quickly realized that he shares my passion for goals-based investing, so I decided to read his book, The Aspirational Investor. As a practitioner, I thoroughly enjoyed the book and wanted to share some of the perspective it offers.

Ashvin offers advisors and investors a different framework for allocating their money. His core belief is that "too many investors spend far too much time focused on the performance of the markets rather than on their preparedness for meeting their life's goals. This focus on markets leads to an unrelenting obsession with outperformance. And this misguided focus, in turn, can lead to all sorts of misbehaviors, many unintended, that are destructive to your wealth."1

His framework is one derived from objective-driven investing in which you logically connect different types of investments to different goals. He starts with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and argues that this pyramid provides an “eloquently straightforward way to think about how to order those goals and the consequences of falling short.”2 This resonates with me as an advisor as I regularly witness people focusing on aspirational goals before they have built a solid foundation. This often leads to financial stress or dissatisfaction.

Ashvin’s framework involves essential goals, important goals, and aspirational goals. He rationalizes the amount of risk one would assume in pursuing each of these goals. For example, an essential goal would be safety and shelter, for which he logically argues that you should employ lower-risk and lower-return investments to address these goals. His framework is dynamic, to account for the fact that as your wealth grows, the dollars allocated amongst these goals will periodically need to be adjusted. By separating your life goals into buckets, you will ultimately make better investment decisions and be more fulfilled and confident.

As Ashvin says, "Investing is about you. Your investment strategy can and must be designed to help you make progress toward the things that matter most. It should not be a blunt instrument of force, whose primary aim is to ‘beat the market.’"3

We hope you find this perspective helpful, and as always if you have questions about your personal situation, please feel free to reach out.

Chhabra, Ashvin B. The Aspirational Investor. Harper Business, 2015.

1.Chhabra, p. 121.
2.Chhabra, p. 79.
3.Chhabra, p. 183.