Changing the way people think about
money and investing
“If financial markets do not care about you, as they surely do not, why should the success of your life’s goals depend on their whims?”
Featured in the following
The Aspirational Framework
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Identify Your Needs and Aspirations
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Prioritize Your Goals
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Organize Your Balance Sheet using the Aspirational Framework
Identify Your Needs and Aspirations
The Aspirational Investor Framework
is
based on three universal human
needs:
to protect, grow & aspire!
Wealth Allocation Framework
The Framework is designed to accommodate the three seemingly incompatible objectives that should underpin every wealth management plan.
Protect
Your priority is safety—protecting yourself from financial shocks that could impact your standard of living. The assets in the “protect” bucket are there to ensure that your essential needs—food, shelter, and security—are covered, no matter how financial markets perform.
Grow
In order to sustain your lifestyle over the long-term you can grow your wealth, earning market returns, by investing in a well-diversified portfolio.
Aspire
Aspirational investments—like starting a business or investing in a start-up—can lead to transformative wealth and new opportunities. However, there is heightened uncertainty on the eventual outcome.
Prioritize Your Goals
We start by identifying and prioritizing all of your goals: Essential, Important & Aspirational.
Essential
Important
Aspirational
Essential
Essential goals are about safety and security—protecting yourself and your family from risks such as job loss, unexpected health expenses, or market crashes.
Some examples of Essential goals:
đź’¸
Emergency savings
🪺
Health & life insurance
đźŹ
Stable housing
🦺
Safety Net
Important
Aspirational
Organize Your Balance Sheet
And then organize your personal balance sheet to align with your needs, goals and what your investments can deliver.
Every investment in your portfolio has an objective - to help you achieve a clearly identified goal.
Safety & Protective Assets
Protecting your financial security means ensuring that no matter what happens in the markets, your essential needs are always covered. This is where Protective Assets come in: they provide stability and peace of mind, shielding you from financial uncertainty and helping you maintain your standard of living.
Market Risk & Market Exposure
To maintain your lifestyle, your investments need to keep pace with the rising cost of living. This means taking on market risk through exposure to Market Assets. As Markowitz explains, while some risk can’t be eliminated, it can be managed through strategic portfolio diversification.
Aspirational Risk & Aspirational Assets
In order to create the possibility of wealth creation and wealth mobility, or to fulfill your aspirational goals, you may decide to allocate Aspirational Assets to investments or business ventures that involve idiosyncratic risk and the potential for substantial capital gain or loss.
A Common Sense Approach to Investing
Get started with the Framework by organizing all of your investments, prioritizing your goals & creating a clear plan.
Meet the author
Welcome to the Course (0:33)
Meet the author
Ashvin B. Chhabra, widely recognized as one of the most innovative minds in finance and investing, began his career as a theoretical physicist...
Born in New Delhi, he studied physics as an undergraduate at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, where he captained the chess team. Winning a scholarship to continue his education in the US, Ashvin received an M.S. from the University of Georgia, Athens. At Yale University, where he did his Ph.D., he was a Becton Fellow, a Fredrick Adler Fellow, and an exchange scholar to MIT. Ashvin’s award-winning thesis work on chaos theory remains a highly cited paper in fractal geometry.
Transitioning to finance, Ashvin helped lead a team to build one of the world’s first robo-advisors for J.P. Morgan (Morgan On-Line circa 1999). He eventually became the Global Chief Investment Officer of Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, one of the largest wealth management firms in the world.
Currently, Ashvin is President and CIO of Euclidean Capital, the family office co-founded by James H. Simons (1938–2024). Combining his interests in science and finance, he serves on the investment committees of Rockefeller University, the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Stony Brook Foundation.
Dissatisfied with existing frameworks for understanding market risk and financial planning and contemplating the fact that “many otherwise smart, successful people make poor investment decisions while chasing the markets,” Ashvin developed the concept of goals-based investing. He then outlined a new Wealth Allocation Framework in his landmark paper Beyond Markowitz, combining Modern Portfolio Theory with Behavioral Finance.
Ashvin advocates rethinking the purpose of money and investing in your life. He hopes that the Aspirational Framework will be useful to you in that important endeavor.
This website is for educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice or connected to his place of employment.