The Ten Years Nobody Was Watching
by Jim Ristuccia
I was at my mom’s house a few weeks ago, going through the kind of paperwork that accumulates in a family over four decades, when we found a bundle of savings bonds in the safe deposit box. Twenty-four of them. Series EE, purchased between 1986 and 1988, back when the Treasury sold them at half of face value — twenty-five dollars bought you a fifty-dollar bond, and you waited.
My parents had been buying them a quarter at a time deducted from their New York Telephone paycheck. Six hundred dollars of real money, set aside a little at a time by people who did not have a lot of it. If you want to understand a certain kind of American, that’s the whole story right there. They weren’t chasing anything. They were putting something away for later, for someone else (me), quietly, without ever mentioning it.
I took them to the bank and cashed them out. Twenty-five hundred dollars.
On its face, that’s a fine outcome. The money grew. Nothing was lost. The bonds did exactly what savings bonds are designed to do — protect principal, pay a modest return, and never once cost anybody a night of sleep. Roughly three percent a year over forty years. Safe, in every sense of the word.
But I already knew what the other side of that ledger looked like, because in 1990 I ran a small experiment on myself.
I’d spent years staring at those hypothetical charts in the back of financial magazines — if you had invested $10,000 in 1970 — and I never really believed them. So I put a thousand dollars into Fidelity Puritan, a plain diversified fund, turned on dividend reinvestment, and then did the hardest thing an investor can do, which is nothing at all. No additions. No tinkering. No timing the market. I just wanted to see what would actually happen if I left it alone.
That thousand dollars is worth about thirty-four thousand today.
To make it a fair comparison, scale it down. My parents’ six hundred dollars would have been worth around seven hundred by 1990 — same money, same starting line. Seven hundred dollars in that fund, left alone, reinvesting, would be roughly twenty-four thousand dollars now.
Twenty-five hundred against twenty-four thousand. Same family, same era, same discipline of setting money aside. Three percent versus ten point three. Give that gap forty years and it stops being a gap and becomes a different life.
Now, the honest objection: those aren’t the same instrument, and they were never supposed to be. Savings bonds carry no market risk. The fund lived through the dot-com collapse and 2008, and watching a third of your money evaporate twice is not a theoretical exercise. Safety is a real product and my parents bought it on purpose. I’m not going to stand here in 2026, with the benefit of a completed chart, and tell two people raising kids on a tight budget that they should have been braver.
But safety isn’t free, and it isn’t neutral. What you’re actually purchasing when you buy certainty is a ceiling. That’s the trade. It’s a legitimate trade. It just needs to be made with your eyes open, because the cost never shows up on a statement. It shows up in a number you never see, forty years later, in a bank lobby.
That’s the part most people take from a story like this. Diversify, start early, let compounding work. True enough, and you’ve heard it before.
Here’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.
Those bonds stopped earning interest entirely at thirty years. Every one of them hit its final maturity somewhere around 2016, 2017, 2018 — and then sat in that safe deposit box for the better part of a decade, earning exactly zero. Not a low rate. Zero. A dead asset in a locked box, still looking every bit as official and valuable as the day it was purchased.
Nobody made a bad decision there. That’s what gets me. Nobody made any decision. The original choice in 1987 was defensible, considered, even loving. What happened after 2016 wasn’t a choice at all. It was an absence — the absence of anyone stopping to ask whether the thing was still doing what it was bought to do.
The instrument didn’t fail. The stewardship did.
I spend something north of five hundred hours a year in rooms with CEOs and business owners, and I will tell you that I see that exact pattern more than any other. Not recklessness. Not incompetence. Not some dramatic collapse. Just good, capable, hardworking leaders running a business that contains three or four things nobody has looked at in years, because nothing about them appears to be broken.
The comp plan that made sense when you had eleven employees. The pricing model you set before your input costs moved. The report that gets built every month and read by no one. The role you’ve never handed off because you’re still faster at it. The client you’ve been carrying since the beginning. The belief about your market that was accurate in 2019 and has quietly expired since.
None of it is bleeding. None of it is urgent. So it sits in the box, and it keeps looking like an asset, and it hasn’t earned anything in a very long time.
I spent twenty years in the Navy, and one thing you learn early on a ship is that a one-degree error in heading doesn’t announce itself. Hour one, you’re fine. Hour two, you’re fine. A thousand miles later you are not a little bit off course, you are somewhere else entirely. Nobody made a mistake at any single moment. The correction just never came, because nobody with a different vantage point ever looked at the chart.
That’s what perspective actually does, and it’s why I do this work. It isn’t that outside input hands a leader a better answer to today’s question. It’s that it changes the heading. One good decision this quarter — the hire you make instead of the one you settle for, the initiative you kill before it eats another year, the thing you finally delegate — doesn’t stay one decision. It gives you back time, and better time produces better decisions, and those stack. That’s compounding. It works the same way in a business as it does in a fund, and it fails the same way too: quietly, invisibly, with everything still looking fine.
That’s the whole reason I chair Vistage groups. Not because a room full of peers is magic, and not because anyone in it has your answers. Because a leader running alone has no mechanism for the question nobody inside the company is positioned to ask. The same assumptions, the same filters, the same explanations, month after month. There is motion. There isn’t always lift. A peer group is simply a structure that forces the box open on a regular schedule, in front of people who have no reason to flatter you.
My parents did the honorable thing. They saved. For most families, that habit is the real victory and I’d never diminish it. But the bonds are gone now, and what I kept from them isn’t a lesson about asset allocation.
It’s a question, and it’s a better one to ask on a Tuesday in July than in a bank lobby in forty years:
What’s in your business right now that still looks like an asset, but stopped earning a long time ago — and who in your life is actually positioned to tell you?