Wealth & Wellness

A 5-minute read on what happens when you price a skipped session the way an advisor prices a skipped retirement deposit.

A missed retirement contribution has a price everyone agrees on. Skip a $500 deposit at 35 and, at ordinary market returns, you’ve declined something like $3,800 at 65: the contribution plus thirty years of compounding it never got. Advisors put that number in front of clients precisely because the $500 feels small and the $3,800 doesn’t. A skipped workout gets no such treatment. It just evaporates, unpriced.

So run the same math. One session’s value isn’t the calories or the mood bump; it’s the marginal contribution to a compounding balance: strength that makes the next decade’s sessions possible, aerobic capacity that keeps the stairs boring at 70, insulin sensitivity, bone density. Miss one, and you don’t lose one session’s worth of fitness. You lose that deposit plus everything it would have earned: the adaptations that would have stacked on top of it.

Here the analogy gets uncomfortable in an interesting way. Markets don’t care about your consistency; a skipped deposit doesn’t shrink the balance you already have. Bodies do care. Fitness left uncontributed-to doesn’t just stop growing; it decays. A skipped workout is closer to a missed deposit plus a small early-withdrawal penalty. The pricing error most people make runs in exactly the wrong direction.

None of this means one missed session matters much; it doesn’t, and the last issue argued for miss rules without penance. The point is the asymmetry in how we account. A $500 skip gets a projection; a skipped Tuesday gets a shrug. The experiment: next time you’re deciding whether to go, price the session first. Not in guilt, in thirty-year dollars. Then decide. Most decisions survive the pricing. The interesting ones don’t.

P.S. Tomorrow: the annual physical, priced as the cheapest insurance premium you’ll ever be offered.