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He and I had 20 What’s Your Future Worth? a decent enough relationship, but what would it mean to be “in business” with him for the next few decades? Assuming my future working career would be at least forty years, lurking in the back of my mind was also another aspect of the proposition that suggested I should grab the money. Specifically, it seemed to me that while the $10,000 was a sure thing, would I really have to pay Mordecai each and every year for the next forty? Wasn’t it possible that some radical change in either his or my circumstance would render the contract unenforceable or moot?

I also made a basic mistake when I attempted step 4—setting a discount rate to compare the future to the present. I made the completely unwarranted judgment that Elise should use some “objective foregone investment return” as a means to produce an apples-toapples comparison. In fact, that factor—how much to value the future versus the present—is a deeply personal matter, and no one should presume to tell someone else how to make that judgment. Clearly for Elise, her long-term future was far more important to her than her current compensation, and hence she was, I suspect, using a much lower discount rate than I was assuming.

For this particular decision, I used a relatively low personal rate of discount though others facing the same choice whose discount rate is higher might have done the right thing by accepting the money. Mordecai’s Proposition— A Question of Present Value 21 But whether or not I made the right decision is not the point. What is important is that Mordecai’s proposition is the essential question of this book. Namely, what is your future worth, and how do you determine it? For almost forty years I’ve been thinking about this question, and in the next few chapters I will tell you what I’ve discovered about how to answer it.