There are two reasons for joining the board at Rebalance. One was anger and one was love. The anger part is: it really bothers me that normal, everyday investors, real people, the people that I meet all the time need to have access to a low-cost, sensible program that will solve the problem that they know they’ve got, but they just don’t have time to solve it themselves. They’d like some safe, sensible way to get pretty damn good investment advice and capability on a systematic and regular basis, somebody watching out.

“Knowing that it’s gonna work out fine is really, really helpful.”

When you’re leaving the house and your children are gonna be there, the kids are probably gonna be fine. But still nice to know that you’ve got a sitter taking care of the kids to be sure it stays fine. If you have a burglar alarm, you may do as we do at our home, turn on the burglar alarm at night. Do we expect anything? Certainly not. It is a good idea to do it anyway? Yes, it is. Because knowing that it’s gonna work out fine is really, really helpful. And plain straightforward investing, not exactly simplistic investing, but plain straightforward investing is the key to success long term in investing for almost all of us.

And here’s an opportunity—the love part—to work with two of the people I have learned over many, many years to admire most in the investment world: Jay Vivian who was the investment manager for IBM’s very large retirement security system and Burt Malkiel who is probably Princeton’s favorite professor and has written one of the most wonderfully popular books on investing and is a man that I’ve known for a long, long time. And he’s fun to work with, bright as could be and very, very effective.