Saturday, January 13, 2018

That Time I Maximized Regret

My last post, Minimizing Regret, described a decision tool that was used by Jeff Bezos (now reported to be the world's richest person, by the way[1]) and Harry Markowitz, and one I have used extensively throughout my adult life when faced with important decisions. Last week I regretted not using it more.

My home has two HVAC systems, one for the downstairs and one for the upstairs bedrooms and bathrooms. I had both installed after we moved here eleven years ago.

Eleven years isn't an awfully long lifespan for a modern HVAC system; one hopes to get 15 years and perhaps 20 years of service before replacing them.

Ours had become unreliable. We had failures at least once in each of the past three winters so I decided to replace the downstairs unit with a more efficient gas furnace last fall. I hoped to get a year or two more service from the upstairs unit and reasoned that, even if it failed, we could limp along with the new downstairs unit while we repaired the upstairs. Besides, squeezing a couple more years out of the old unit and postponing the replacement costs was only good economics, right?

Last week, the Raleigh area experienced the worst cold spell in the past 130 years according to local news reports and measured at RDU. No doubt it was actually longer but they've only kept records for 130 years. Not surprisingly, our upstairs unit failed (heating systems rarely fail around here in July) plunging our bedroom and bathroom into a permafrost zone as temperatures outside fell to as low as 4º F.

(As an aside, please note that improbable events are not impossible, like 4º low temperatures in Chapel Hill, NC and investment portfolio failures, but I digress.)

Now, that may sound wimpy to the sturdy folks of Embarrass, Minnesota, but let's just say that I had different expectations when I retired to North Carolina.

Given the cold spell's demand on local HVAC service companies, it took two days to have a repairman spend 10 minutes determining that the cost of repairs would be nearly the cost of installing a new system. I learned this late Friday afternoon and had to wait until Monday morning to have the new furnace installed.


That time I maximized regret.
[Tweet this]


We lost heat on Wednesday, the day the cold spell began, and had an operational system again on Monday evening, the day the cold spell ended, proving for the umpteenth time that Murphy was not only a genius but also an optimist.

For five days, I slept in long flannel pajamas, wool socks, and a hoodie with a hot water bottle near my feet. (And let me just throw this out there: hot water bottles are a delight that we maybe shouldn't relegate to history's dustbin, as they say.)

I learned to shower, shave and get dressed in under 90 seconds.

Had I followed my own advice when deciding to delay installation of the upstairs heat pump instead of replacing both during the perfect temperatures last fall, I would have anticipated my regret from all possible outcomes.

Had I replaced the upstairs system last fall and missed out on the few dollars of savings I would gain from delaying, my inner financial analyst would have regretted the lost savings opportunity.

I would have anticipated regretting much more my actual outcome, a week of frosty indoor temperatures for the want of saving a hundred bucks or so.

By failing to give my decision the gravity it deserved, I maximized regret.

To put this into a retirement planning context, consider the ever-popular "probability of ruin." We can build a retirement plan that has "only" a 1-in-10 to 1-in-20 chance that we will outlive our savings, but it's probably worth a few minutes considering how much we might regret our plan if we lost that bet.

To my credit, I avoided the Tech Crash by reasoning that, while I would regret selling my tech stocks if prices continued to soar, I would regret far more losing the financial security I had already attained on paper.

A dear friend lost his entire $4M retirement savings when MCI crashed. He was nearing retirement age. That's a lot of regret.

It was 34º when we headed for the coffee shop the morning after we got the heat fixed.

It felt downright balmy.


REFERENCES


[1] Mr. Amazon Steps Out, The New York Times









2 comments:

  1. Great analogy. You are lucky that your plumbing system, water pipes and all, did not freeze, adding yet another layer of issues and regret. Add the plumbing system failure as a health care problems analogy to your heating system as portfolio management analogy...

    ReplyDelete
  2. This blog was... how do you say it? Relevant!! Finally I've found something that helped me.

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete