To the principal.
The most expensive sentence in a treasury policy is rarely a number. It is the option. We will figure out the corridor later. We will write the rebalancing bands next quarter. We will name the custody stack when the family is ready. On paper, it reads as prudence. In practice, it is a quiet form of drift, and drift compounds the way interest compounds, only in the wrong direction.
Optionality looks free because the cost is not on the page where the option is written. It is on every page that follows, in the form of a decision deferred. A corridor that has not been named is a corridor the desk will improvise, with the principal watching. A rebalancing band that has not been written is a band the desk will talk itself into or out of, on a Tuesday morning, depending on how the morning reads. A custody stack that has not been chosen is a stack the household will inherit from whoever answered the phone first.
The cost of an open option is not the option itself. It is the half-life of the decision. Every quarter the choice stays open, the household pays in optionality tax: a small drag on return, a small drag on attention, a small drag on the principal's confidence that the desk is operating with a written rule rather than a working memory. None of it shows on a single statement. Over a season, it shows everywhere.
A written commitment is not the absence of optionality. It is the relocation of it. Once the corridor is named, the principal keeps the option to revisit it on a written cadence, against a written trigger, with a written answer. The optionality is preserved, but it is parked in a place the household can see. That is the only form of optionality that is actually cheap.
The desk's posture on this is uncomplicated. When a policy is being drafted, every open option is asked the same question: who is this deferral for, and what is the cost of deferring it for another season? If the answer is the principal's peace of mind, the option is named, narrowed, and dated. If the answer is the desk's peace of mind, the option is closed. The principle is that the household pays the cost of the open door, not the desk.
Name the corridor before the next quarter. Date it. Sign it. Then keep the option to revisit it on the cadence the policy already names. That is the cheap version of optionality, and it is the only version the desk recommends.
The desk.