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• Emotional assets. Good physical and mental health, rewarding relationships
with family and friends, free time, access to entertaining or stimulating
activities, ability to win friends and influence people, inner peace (however it
may be attained), and. . . .
Your personal liabilities include anything that can require you to give up
satisfaction now or in the future, such as
• Financial liabilities. Mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, student loans, bills
payable, taxes payable, alimony, gambling debts, and. . . .
• Physical liabilities. Borrowed lawnmower, and. . . .
• Intellectual liabilities. Necessity to spend time providing labor or services or to
spend time acquiring new skills and knowledge.
• Emotional liabilities. Necessity to endure physical pain or emotional angst,
obligations to spend time with boring, aggravating, or otherwise unpleasant
people.
So now we have the means to sum up the entire value of your life in one number:
well-being, which equals personal assets minus personal liabilities. We could adopt a
specific, quantifiable definition of personal risk: the reduction in well-being that could
occur with a given probability within a given period of time. Personal risk is
analogous to the value-at-risk (VaR) methods used by corporations. By assessing the
possible changes in value of your personal