facebook twitter instagram linkedin google youtube vimeo tumblr yelp rss email podcast phone blog search brokercheck brokercheck Play Pause
%POST_TITLE% Thumbnail

Financial Decisions and Self-Doubt

Education Personal Finance

You’ve led a successful career so far, earning recognition and increased compensation along the way. You’re good at what you do and are confident in making decisions at work, after all, that’s why you’ve been successful. Yet, when it comes to making financial decisions that will affect your family for years to come, self-doubt creeps in. At work, an issue arises, you learn all you can about the issue, bounce ideas off your peers and come to a resolution. Quickly. Efficiently. Confidently. So, why then, does a difficult financial decision cause so much self-doubt? I think I know a few reasons:

  1. You’re not an expert. You didn’t go to school for personal finance. You don’t live with it on a daily basis. You don’t have time to research everything the internet has to offer on a certain topic and then distill it down to your situation.
  2. You can’t just “bounce it off your peers”. Why? Because they’re probably in the same situation, not financial experts and time constrained and, even if they were, they don’t know your full situation and you’re not willing to share your financial details with them!
  3. You don’t have knowledge of the experiences of others before you, others in the same position, with similar considerations, to model your decisions after. You might see someone that you think is successful, or that appears to be in the same financial situation as you, but are they really?

So, when faced with a decision, you procrastinate. Maybe the answer will come to you and, if it doesn’t, you can keep putting off the decision. Heck, you’re not planning to retire for 10 years anyway, right?

Or, you make a decision, but worry about whether it was the right decision. Making the decision felt good because it got it off your plate of the never-ending things to do on a daily basis; but do you still feel good about it? Or are you worried that the decision you made was wrong and you won’t know it was wrong for years down the road?

We don’t help people pick stocks. We help people make financial decisions decisively, timely and with confidence. People have enough to worry about today, whether they’re making financial decisions that will ultimately hurt their family or put them behind their peers shouldn’t be one of them.