Dear Quentin,

I wrote to you recently about my own financial journey (“My wife and I retired with 22 times our income. Why don’t more people do what we did?”) and how I see money as a “clone” of myself, and how through compounding it continues to work on my behalf when I am unwilling or unable to work. I mentioned that my friend lost millions on roads not taken and shared how I helped him view his relationship with money differently.

He was very highly paid during the heyday of publishing as a senior editor and eventually editor-in-chief of a major publication. His earnings from the late 1980s onward were in the $250,000 to $450,000 range. He lived very frugally and maxed out his 401(k)s but didn’t really pay attention to them. Worst of all, he kept everything else in cash (in a bank, not under a mattress).