There’s a 92-year-old client who comes into my office, and every time he sits down across from me, he pulls out the same photograph.
It is bruised. It is battered. He has been carrying it for over seventy-five years.
It’s a picture of his wife. She is sixteen in the photo. She passed last year. And when he pulls it out, he cries every single time.
That is the image he chooses to remember her by. Not the wedding photo. Not the kids and grandkids photo. The teenage girl he fell in love with before he had any money, any career, or any title worth mentioning.
I think about that moment a lot. I think about it every time I help someone build a financial plan, because there is a quiet question hiding underneath every spreadsheet I have ever put in front of a family. Are we building the kind of life that produces that moment? Or are we just building a bigger number?
The Wealth You Cannot Put On A Balance Sheet
My grandparents worked at Pittsburgh Plate Glass. Both of them.
They worked the kind of swing shift that breaks most people. Seven days of eight to four. One day off. Seven days of four to midnight. Two days off. Seven days of midnight to eight in the morning. Four days off. Then it started again.
They did that for over twenty years. Both of them retired from there. And on top of that, my grandfather ran a tax business and a rod and reel repair business out of an addition he built onto the house.
There was no inheritance handed down to me. Not in dollars.
But there were lessons. There was a coon skin cap. There was a pocket watch. There was a tax business that bartered horse manure for tax prep because most of the clients were Amish. My grandfather is almost seventy years old and still doing taxes, because at this point, what else is he going to do.
When I work with clients today, I sometimes trade headshots for dental work. I did not invent that. I inherited it.
That is the kind of wealth that does not show up on a 1099. And it is the kind of wealth that, if you are not paying attention, you will spend your whole life chasing the wrong version of.
Resume Qualities Versus Eulogy Qualities
There is a sermon I heard from a pastor named Aaron Brockett back in 2025 that has stuck with me ever since. He talked about the difference between resume qualities and eulogy qualities.
Resume qualities are the things you build to look impressive. Titles. Revenue. Assets under management. Square footage. The things that look good on a LinkedIn bio.
Eulogy qualities are the things people stand up and say about you at your funeral. The patience. The presence. The way you showed up for your kids. The stories your friends tell about you around a campfire after you are gone.
You can build either one. Most people try to build both at the same time and end up failing at the more important one.
“Time is the real wealth at the end of the day.” – Sean Kirby
You only get so much of it. You can pour it into the resume version of your life, or you can pour it into the eulogy version. The math does not let you ace both.
You Cannot Rob Peter To Pay Paul With Your Time
My dad has a phrase he uses constantly. You cannot rob Peter to pay Paul.
When you put something on payments, you are buying something today at the sacrifice of what you want most later. That is true with debt. It is also true with time.
When you take an extra hour from your kids tonight so you can answer one more email, you are robbing your future self. When you take a Saturday morning away from the people who live in your house so you can chase one more client, you are putting your eulogy on a credit card.
It does not feel like that in the moment. It feels productive. It feels responsible. It feels like you are doing what a good provider does.
But the bill comes due. It always does.
What This Looks Like In Practice
So what do you actually do about it? A few honest starting points.
Ask yourself what you want said about you when you are not in the room anymore. Not what you want printed on a business card. What you want said.
Audit where your time actually goes for a week. Not where you think it goes. Where it actually goes. Most family men I work with are stunned by the gap between the two.
Find one place this week where you can stop robbing your future self with today’s time. One conversation you have been postponing. One bedtime you have been outsourcing. One small moment of presence that costs you almost nothing and pays you everything.
You will not feel like a hero for doing it. That is part of the deal. Eulogy qualities do not come with applause in the moment they are built. The applause comes at the end, when you are not there to hear it.
The Photograph You Are Going To Be Remembered By
That 92-year-old client of mine is not going to be remembered for his net worth. Honestly, I have no idea what his net worth even is, and it isn’t the part of him I’ll remember.
He is going to be remembered for seventy-five years of carrying around a photograph of a sixteen-year-old girl who became his wife.
That is the wealth he built. That is the inheritance he is leaving.
The only question that actually matters is this: What is the photograph people are going to carry around of you? What is the story they are going to tell?
You still have time to answer that. But not as much as you think.
If anything in this episode landed for you, the Performance Financial team would love to have a real conversation about what investing your time wisely could look like for your specific situation. The link to book a call is in the show notes.
Transcript
TJ: Talk about your family, your work ethic, where that came from, and how you’re using it today.
Sean: All right, what’s this? Pittsburgh Plate Glass. People probably know PPG from their paint work at this point, but they were founded on automotive plate glass. Literally a giant furnace that melts sand and other chemicals into long sheets of glass, then cuts and scores it and gets it packed up. Used to be packed by hand. My grandparents both worked at this factory, and they worked swing shifts.
They worked seven days straight of eight to four, one day off. Seven days straight of four to midnight, two days off. Seven days straight of midnight to eight in the morning. Then they got four days off and repeated. For 20-plus years. They both did that and retired from there. God bless.
But they all had their own entrepreneurial efforts on top of that. My grandfather ran a tax business. Fun story. It’s mostly Amish people where he’s from. So some of the tax deals, I get my bartering from. He trades horse manure for his garden in exchange for doing the Amish people’s taxes. That’s a fun little part of the business that I picked up, where I trade headshots for dental work at times.
My grandfather on my paternal side also had a rod and reel repair business. So he hunted, fished, trapped, sold pelts, repaired people’s rods. A portion of the house was added on to do that.
So you get the tax strategy side of things going on, and it was an inspiration to go, yeah, you can find other ways to find a lifestyle business that allows you to make sure the kids have Christmas gifts. To make sure the kids, when they go to college, can get $50 pizza money sent to them. They were always really working hard to make sure our family wasn’t below the poverty line.
I’m really grateful to get to talk about them today. One, because my grandpa does taxes and you guys do tax. So that’s a fun story. He’s always wanted me to take it over. I have no interest in running a tax business, but he’s always like, I’m gonna quit doing this someday. He’s retired. He’s almost 70 and he still does taxes, because what else is he gonna do?
But none of that became, I need to run the biggest business so I can scale it and sell it. It never became any of that. It was just a mode for them to be the best members of their family that they could.
TJ: Would you consider that the real wealth?
Sean: I think so. They’re the two mentors that I look up to the most. Happy people. Not the wealthiest. No inheritance was handed down to me. But I inherited some lessons. Which I think means more than anything.
For the longest time, I was nepotized at my job making $11 an hour for my dad. And it took almost four years for me to realize that it wasn’t about money in the first place. It was the fact that I was a window away listening to his little Mike-isms through the window about how he spoke to clients, how he empathized with clients, how we can take our skills.
I’m not laying brick. I work in the air conditioning, then I work in the heat. This is not a haircut for outside work. So taking that in and shifting to where you can empathize and work with people who are out there putting themselves and their bodies on the line to feed their families every day. I got a real wind of that.
The synchronicity of all things, PPG ended up being my college job. When summers came around, I got to go work there for four summers and work the swing shifts. Now a lot more of it is automated. It wasn’t as brutal as they had it, but it was tough.
But also another lesson of a role model standing up for you. I got turned down in the interviews. They said, no, we’re not interested in having you for our summer program. And my grandfather went in there and was like, both grandpas retired from here. You are not going to not hire this guy. He had built up enough sway and loyalty at that company that I ended up getting hired. So his efforts at that company paid off as an investment long-term for me.
TJ: What else you got in your bag, big dog?
Sean: Grandpa Tom’s coon skin cap. There you go. We also made some money sometimes by going to the creek area, kicking around with hip waders till you find a hole, set a trap, catch some muskrats, get the coon skins, sell those, make a little extra cash on the side.
I love this. I don’t think you knew it, TJ, when you came up with the cover of the podcast, but this is one of the few things that has been passed down to me. My grandfather handed me down a pocket watch. It’s probably worth a couple hundred bucks, but I keep it. Something like you talked about, that depression era where something was important to him that he handed down to me.
Time is the real wealth at the end of the day.
What a blessing it is to be surrounded by people who have invested in you. Financially, spiritually, with their education, wisdom, stories. The wisdom that we learn from those around us is so easily, especially when you’re early in life, you just let it go. It’s not anything you do on purpose. You’re just a kid.
But the older I get, the more I love to talk to older people and just say, how’d you do it? How’d you get here? And then you let them talk. They’ve been waiting their whole lives.
You’ve got to be careful asking an old person how they are, because they’ll tell you. And it’s a long story and they’re not doing very good. They’ve been to the doctor four times this week.
But if you ask somebody, I’ve got this older client in my office. He’s 92, something like that, and he still carries around the same picture of his wife from when she was 16 years old. It is bruised, battered, beat up. She had passed last year. And he cried as he pulled it out. But that’s what he remembered her as. A 16-year-old kid.
It’s one of those things that you hope, through the small little, how’d you make it to 62 years of marriage, that you can take your little bit, put a spin on it, and refocus that to where your kids someday won’t just remember Christmas presents, birthday presents, their first car. They can say, my parents told me these funny stories, my dad was hilarious. These little things.
As you reallocate your time, you find at the end you may not have $6 million you’re taking 4% out of every single year. But maybe it’s just the fact that you are able to tell your war stories to the kids around a campfire and you have enough people sitting at your bedside the day you pass. That’s the goal. At least I believe.
And there’s no way to hit that if you rob Peter now by pulling all that time away from your kids, those moments, those small things.
At the end of your life, when you look at it at a much broader scope, you can say, I really want to build these eulogy-level qualities that people talk about me at my funeral that I’ll never get to hear.
Not resume qualities. Eulogy qualities.
TJ, you might have caught that from a sermon from Aaron Brockett back in 2025. But that’s what’s on my last piece of my goal list. What I want to achieve. Eulogy-level qualities. Not that people talk about me, but that you can instill those values into the people you get to spend time with.