Podcast Episode 266: Why We Struggle to Make Financial Decisions
First up is the inability to sort through all the information at hand. The world doesn’t make this easy on us. Think back 25 years ago and you might have read a newspaper, magazine or watched a daily tv show. Now you have endless information at your fingers and it can be paralyzing to try to sift through everything and determine what’s useful.
Advisors can also make that difficult for you if they provide you with a financial plan that’s hundreds of pages long. It’s just too much stuff and more than most people want to know. It ends up causing you to do nothing and that means failing to plan, which isn’t the ideal scenario.
Kind of along these same lines, too much research keeps up from making a decision. It’s great to be informed and we encourage everyone to know exactly what they’re investing in, but at the end of the day, people just want to know their plan is going to work. You want to work with someone who you can build that trust and have confidence you’re in the right investments.
Another issue surrounding money and finances is just general confusion. Money isn’t the easiest thing to understand and it’s our job to make sure we present things in a clear and concise manner. In these cases, we find it’s best to lay out each individual step and take clients through them one at a time.
The next impediment to decision-making that we often see is not enjoying the conversations surrounding money. Some people just don’t feel comfortable when the topic of finances comes up. That can be problematic because you just don’t know where you stand if you aren’t talking about it. Being uncomfortable shouldn’t be the reason your retirement gets off track, but it can if you don’t have the proper conversations.
No matter what keeps you from wanting to have those discussions or making the important decisions, we’re here to talk about whatever you are comfortable with to establish that relationship. As always, we offer up the opportunity to get your Money Map review to do just that.
Listen to the full show using the audio player and keep an ear out for these topics:
1:16 – Too many decisions to make
3:26 – Too much research
4:49 – Too confusing
6:43 – Don’t like talking about money
10:50 – Traumatic life events
