Be curious, not judgmental

In the Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso, the title character delivers a short line in Season 1 Episode 8 (“The Diamond Dogs”, 2020): “Be curious, not judgmental.” In the scene Ted credits Walt Whitman. That credit is wrong. Snopes and Ed Folsom, co-director of the Walt Whitman Archive, are clear: Whitman never wrote or said those words. The line belongs to the series dialogue and to the character, not to the poet.

For money and cover the attitude still travels well. Many decisions start with a judgment: too expensive, too complicated, too good to be true, or “I don’t need that.” The judgment often arrives faster than the questions. Curiosity would ask about your own life first. What might the family look like in five years? What if income wobbles or someone is off work for a long stretch? How far does the time horizon really run when you stay honest with yourself?

That is why, in the CapitalPath approach, understanding comes before deciding. A tariff or a tip is not yet an answer while the question it is meant to solve is still fuzzy. If you ask what your life needs first, you hear advice differently and spot more quickly what only sounds cheap for the moment. The points that belong to private retirement planning are set out on the private retirement page.

Mira is 41 and works in HR at a mid-sized engineering firm in Cologne. On Friday morning her colleague Jonas brings coffee, sits at her desk and slides across a printout of a “particularly cheap” pension offer. “It pays off straight away,” he says. “The other figures are just marketing.” Mira looks at the low contribution and feels the familiar pull: either sign now or push the sheet aside because something this cheap always has a catch.

Midway through the second sip she stops at that pull. She knows Jonas as someone who likes quick verdicts, and she notices she is about to do the same. So she asks questions that have nothing to do with the premium. What if she went part-time in a couple of years, which she and her partner have already talked about? What if one of them were off work for a long time because of illness? How long is the money meant to last, and what do they actually know about what they already have? Jonas shrugs. “I hadn’t thought about that. I only compared the contribution.”

Back at her desk Mira sticks three notes along the bottom of her monitor. One asks about family and working hours, one about a longer drop in income, one about the time horizon. The offer goes into the same folder as other papers she has not yet understood. She has not forgotten the premium. It simply no longer sits in first place.