Ep 100: Not-So-Smart Things Even Smart Investors Do

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Intro:

Well, hey there and welcome to another edition of Retire Smarter, Walter Storholt with you today. Not alongside Kevin Kroskey, we’ve given him the day off. And instead we have a Certified Financial Planner with True Wealth Design Tyler Emrick. Part of the great team that serves you in Northeast Ohio. But, of course, the entire team at True Wealth Design can serve you literally wherever you live. As this podcast, you can obviously listen to anywhere and everywhere, but they do have office locations in Northeast Ohio, Southwest Florida, and the greater Pittsburgh area as well. And we’ve got a great show on the way today. Before we preview all of it, Tyler it’s great to have you back on the show with us. How you been lately?

Tyler Emrick:

I’ve been doing great. Happy to be here Walter. Just recovering from a long weekend. I think Kevin threw me into the fire here saying, “Hey, do your first solo podcast right after you have a big birthday party for your two little daughters.”

Walter Storholt:

Oh, nice. How was the party? Did it have a theme or what’d you guys go for?

Tyler Emrick:

No theme per se, but I have two little girls. The oldest is three, or just turned three on the 22nd here just a few days ago. And the youngest just turned one. So, we had a house full of kids running around, this exciting cake, and all that good stuff, but boy, was it exhausting? So I think-

Walter Storholt:

You don’t need a theme at that age, there’s enough chaos without introducing some theme into it with kids at that age.

Tyler Emrick:

Yes. Yes. And I, actually I owe my wife a big shout-out. She had this bright idea of getting a bounce house and I guess this is the new thing. And I was like, “Oh, we don’t need that. No, no, no.” Probably my frugality coming out a little bit, but we ended up actually going with it and it was perfect. I actually don’t know how we would’ve entertained all the kids if we didn’t have that.

Walter Storholt:

It’s got to be the perfect invention. Because it also just like, don’t the bounce houses usually have walls, so it’s like, they’re all contained.

Tyler Emrick:

Yes. All contained, everyone is safe, no one got hurt and it didn’t rain. We all were up in Cleveland. So you never know what the weather’s going to be like.

Walter Storholt:

Yeah. I think I’ve seen a few bounce house videos where a storm blew in suddenly and the bounce house goes flying away in the wind and sucked up into a tornado, not with kids in it, but they just so-

Tyler Emrick:

Sure. No either way that’s nightmare fuel. I was very happy to see that nothing blew away, nothing flew away and it worked out all right.

Walter Storholt:

Well, glad to hear it, and a Happy Birthday to both of them. Glad that it was a successful weekend. And thanks for taking some time out of your recovery to join us here on the show and give Kevin a week off. I’m looking forward to your topic. So, Tyler gave me a little bit of a preview of what we’re going to be talking about. We live in a culture, Tyler, of mind hacking, you know what I mean? Like life hacks and trying to look for shortcuts and doing more with less. And sometimes those things are, I think, born out of good spirit. But it sounds like your topic today and what you want to really dive into is being a little bit wary of taking some of those mindset shortcuts. Being aware of our behavior as it relates to investing, finances, saving, retirement, and that world. And look at some of the places where people can go a little bit too far in the shortcut realm. Tell us a little bit about why you want to talk about this topic today and let’s dive in.

Tyler Emrick:

No great intro, Walt. That’s exactly right. I mean, I think as we look at the agenda for today, taking a look at those mindset shortcuts that we all can fall victim to when making financial and investment decisions. And I like to think of them as behavioral traps and things that often sabotage performance or affect those important retirement decisions that we make. And I mean, we’re all probably guilty of falling victim to these at some point in our past or whatever the case may be. So I feel like it’s very important that we take a look at them, point them out, and try to understand them a bit. And that way we can understand when they might be creeping into our decision making and we can better avoid them.

Tyler Emrick:

Now we have a few of them that we’re going to talk about today. And I think two of them are really applicable to your investment decisions. Yeah. Walter, as we sit here today, we’re at the end of May. The markets have been extremely volatile to start out the year. I mean, I think the S&P 500 is down just over 16% year to date. And those safe investments, those bonds investments, are down just over nine, nine and a half percent. So we’re probably getting, I don’t know about you, but I’m getting inundated. When I watched the news on some negative headlines, looking at the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks back, and one of the headlines was, “It’s the worst bond market since 1842”. And that’s the good news.

Walter Storholt:

When they start making comparisons back to the Great Depression or World War II, that’s when yeah, it starts catching your eyeballs a little bit. Like, oh, it’s been a long time since things have been this bad. We know on this show from the perspective that you and Kevin have provided before that you can twist stats to mean whatever you want them to mean, but nonetheless, you’re living under a rock if you don’t at least hear the message these days, that things are going not in the right direction right now.

Tyler Emrick:

Correct now, absolutely. And I mean, come on, investing is hard enough. So if there’s anything we can do to make it a little bit easier, then I’m all for it. Then hopefully that’s what the listeners will get out of today.

Walter Storholt:

Well, I’m looking forward to it. And if you’re calling it behavioral traps, it means people are falling in them. So a good goal is Yepto try and avoid those. So what are these traps?

Tyler Emrick:

You got it. So now there, obviously our industry, a lot of acronyms and terminology and things like that’s very specific. So for those of you that listen to the podcast today and might want to look up some more of these, these terms are called cognitive errors or emotional biases. I think behavioral trap sounds a little bit better, but those are more the technical terms that you’ll find these listed under. And we’re going to talk about three of them today and with the first one Walter, and just me and you. So it looks like I’m going to have to rope you in here a little bit and we’ll have to go through a bit of an exercise. So hopefully you-

Walter Storholt:

Do I need to calculator up? Do I need to…

Tyler Emrick:

No, nothing like that. But I didn’t do any prep work for this or set you up, so we’ll see how it goes. But so with this exercise, what I want you to do is I want you to really think about, all right, hey, I’m going to set you up on the scenario and I’m going to give you a choice at the end of it. And we’ll see which road you take.

Walter Storholt:

Okay.

Tyler Emrick:

Now, so picture this. You’re walking down the street. It’s a nice, beautiful day. I mean, really everything is going great, not a care in the world. And you’re just walking along and you happen to look down and staring right back at you as a hundred dollar bill. Now, of course, Walter, I know you’re very astute. So you’re checking the bushes to see if there’s any kids playing a prank and got it tied to some fishing line. And, obviously, I understand that you’re going to do everything you can to find out who that a hundred dollars bill belongs to. But I promise you in this scenario, there’s no kids in the bushes and this is now your hundred dollar bill because there’s no one around. So free money. So my question to you is you have two choices. You can that a hundred dollars and you can go get your favorite restaurant dinner meal or you can save it. What do you think you would do?

Walter Storholt:

I think since I just found it, I would go have fun with it. I’m going to go to the restaurant, have a good meal.

Tyler Emrick:

All right. Good deal. Fair enough.

Walter Storholt:

This actually did happen to me just a few weeks ago, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to the dentist actually and there was a hundred-dollar bill sitting on a little, like a little bistro table outside of the dentist’s office in the shopping center. And I looked at it and I was like, hmm. I looked at it and I was like, “This looks fake.” But a lot of the dollars look fake these days with all the different changes they’ve gone through in the last decade or so. So I took it into the dentist’s office and said, “I think someone left a hundred-dollar bill out here. I don’t know if you know this” And they were like, “Yeah, we think it’s fake. Because we’ve seen a few people.” I was like, “Okay, well I’ll put back out there for the next person.” And then we all joked about waiting for the hidden cameras to come out. So it’s funny that you bring up that scenario, but back to the point I’m going to the restaurant, that’s my choice.

Tyler Emrick:

Yeah, no. Good deal. And really Walter, you’re like most individuals, I mean, when we start analyzing or looking at that decision that you have, whether to spend it or save it, when we start to analyze that decision the answers are what we’re analyzing is what’s called behavioral finance, which is really trying to take a look at well. How does our brain look at making these decisions on managing our money or investing our money? And most individuals, when they find that a hundred-dollar bill are going to treat that as a windfall, like, “Hey, I found it good fortune. I’m going to go ahead and spend it.” And that is the same case for even the most prudent individuals that save their salary and save most of the income that they have coming in because they are looking at that or looking at that money that they found as a windfall and not necessarily something that they earned or worked for and have to actually save.

Tyler Emrick:

Now, this gets to the crux of that first behavioral trap, which is called mental accounting. And just simply put, it just refers to the concept of how people treat money differently depending on where it came from and what we think it should be used for. Now, this is all fine and dandy. But if we start looking at it from more practical applications and how when we look at this, how it’s going to determine the decisions that you make in retirement or the day-to-day decisions that you make from an investment standpoint. You can think about it and we see it a lot with retirees where they’re compartmentalizing the different types of savings that they have. And they oftentimes find it much more difficult to save that money that they have in their 401Ks and their IRAs that they’ve built up over the years and much, much easier to spend things like social security or those pension plans that are coming in on a day in and out basis.

Tyler Emrick:

And maybe another way you can think about it would be, hey, you’ve done a great job saving. You have a good amount in your savings account. It’s not really earning much right now, but you might have a car loan out there. You have other outstanding debt that have a higher interest rate. But you still look at that savings account as your nest egg. And even though you might have ample save back, you’re very reluctant to use it to pay off that debt. And the same thing goes when you start looking at that decision on, “Well, hey, when do I want to take my Social Security? Do I want to take it early? Do I want to wait? Do I want to take it as soon as I retire?” And you start looking at, “Okay, I’m going to have to use my 401K money if I defer that Social Security.”

Tyler Emrick:

And a lot of times there’s a lot of mental challenges and hurdles to get over and it’s much, much easier to make that decision to say, “You know what? I don’t want to get my Social Security. It’s going to be much, much easier for me to start spending that.” Whether it’s a good decision or a bad decision or whether it definitely is a situation where they should defer their Social Security, that overarching feeling of, I just want to start it. I want to get it. And I don’t want to start dipping into that nest egg that I worked so hard to get, it really can start to affect some of those decisions, especially in the short term.

Walter Storholt:

Great points all around, I think. And I identify with a lot of the different things that you’re talking about there, that mental accounting. I had a conversation recently with my dad, it was relatively casual, but about when he and mom pass away eventually, what will happen with their money? And I’m an only child. So they’re like, “It’s pretty obvious. You’re just going to,” and he was just very casual like, “You’ll get it all, do something good with it.” And it’s like, “Oh, okay.”

Walter Storholt:

But already in my mind, I’m like, okay, well I would treat those dollars differently than I would any other dollars. I’m already assigning some emotional value to them. And so it’s interesting to see that play out. And then even from the debt side you were talking about like, you can look at maybe credit card debt or car loan or the mortgage. And I don’t know, there’s different emotional reactions to seeing paying down some of those versus others. And it’s not always the most logical financial win that you should pay down first. If I see that I can get the mortgage down below some $100,000 benchmark, it’s like, that’s going to be emotionally really cool to see that first number go from I don’t know, a three to a two or something like that.

Tyler Emrick:

Right. No, absolutely. I mean, I agree wholeheartedly. And first off, it’s good that you’re talking to your family member about that transition of wealth and looking into it and sharing that to make sure all parties are involved and understand how that works. But yeah, when you start categorizing or again, doing that mental accounting, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to change every decision that you make, but more so having that awareness around it and having the choice or giving yourself the choice to say, “You know what? Hey, this might be the maximizing decision from a financial standpoint, but emotionally I’m fine giving up X, Y or Z.” And that’s really the point, and the awareness of that, hey, we can fall into that and being aware of it will, maybe not change our behavior. In some cases it probably will, but if it doesn’t, that’s okay, but being aware of it. So what you’re giving up or not, I think is extremely valuable and important.

Walter Storholt:

Certainly, makes a lot of sense. So that’s the mental accounting aspect, anymore on that one or are we ready for another behavioral trend?

Tyler Emrick:

No, I think we’ll go ahead and move on to number two. And no test here. Probably the way that I’d like to introduce this one or the way I am going to introduce it. We’ll see how it goes. When it-

Walter Storholt:

Now you find a thousand dollars instead of a hundred dollars. What do you do?

Tyler Emrick:

Right. What’s that trade-off look like? But so for the next one, Walter, I’d probably like to bring in on this one as well and get you to think, and I’m going to probably introduce it just through a very simple, easy question. And I’m going to put you in a scenario, in the situation where you have to buy a house right now. I know you might not be looking, but if I told you, “Hey, you have to move your family and you’re going to have to go into a new house.” Give me a few things that immediately pop into your mind when I tell you to have to do something like that.

Walter Storholt:

Ooh, when you tell me, I have to, I get a little nervous because of higher interest rates compared to what I was paying. And that increase. I start thinking a little bit about market timing of like, oh, housing markets at the top. And I don’t know if I want to buy at the top. And then I start calculating all the costs. I don’t know if we’re moving across the country, but I start thinking about storage units and moving trucks and whether you hire movers. And I feel like that stress level increasing in this scenario as well. And time is crunching together. I remember from previous moves, everything starts to move really fast. When you start thinking about moving and buying and making decisions one after the other and that thing

Tyler Emrick:

Walter, a perfect answer. Or at least you hit every point that I was hoping that you would say, it’s a good deal.

Walter Storholt:

You’re asking me easier questions than Kevin usually gives me. So this is great.

Tyler Emrick:

Nice.

Walter Storholt:

We’re going to invite you back Tyler. That’s a good thing.

Tyler Emrick:

Easy questions and no egg head alert. That’s the if I can get through those two things in this podcast, I’ll consider it to be a success. But yeah, so you’re right. I mean, I think a lot of families in your situation go through that. Whenever they have to make a big decision, whether it’s a big purchase, like a house or a big investment decision, that decision can really start to weigh on you. I mean, I think back to about 18 months ago. I had a family that was thrust into that situation that I set up for you where they actually had a surprise baby, that they were coming on the way completely out of the blue, threw them for a loop. And they really started to prioritize and think about, well boy, our priorities have changed quite a bit with the baby on the way.

Tyler Emrick:

And we’re probably going to, or we are going to have to move out of the house that we’re in now and start thinking about school districts and start thinking about a little bit more space and all that good stuff that comes along with it. When I had talked to them at that time, even still 18 months ago, a lot of those same concerns were expressed to me that you expressed today. Maybe not the interest rate one, but certainly where housing prices were going up and they were wondering, “Hey, are we buying at the top? And is this going to be the right time for us to make that decision?” And I mean, it’s an extremely competitive market at that time as well. I mean there were a lot of people bidding on the same house and I distinctly remember having a conversation with the husband specifically and he’s like, “I just don’t want to regret this purchase or regret this decision.”

Tyler Emrick:

And when you start to think about it that way and you start getting those feelings of regret, you can start really funneling that decision on a lot of the negative, you can start thinking short term and maybe lose sight of that long term goal and things that you’re trying to accomplish. And what we call that or that’s our next point is called regret aversion. And that’s when we basically look at a decision, whether it’s an investment or a purchase and we actually don’t make any decision in their case, they were going to stop putting offers in on houses. They were actually thinking about waiting and going to start up again in a year from when we were talking and they were just like, “You know what? We’re just getting discouraged and we’re done.” And again, there was that fear for the husband, especially the fear of, is this going to be something I’m going to regret down the road? Am I going to find that perfect house?

Tyler Emrick:

So they just don’t do anything. And in their situation, they actually ended up purchasing a house and we ended up talking through it and some of the things at that time where there were low-interest rates and they did need to move and there were major priorities that leaned them in that direction. They got refocused and were able to eventually find a house a few months later from the time that we have that conversation. But many, many families when they go through making these big investment decisions or purchasing decisions can find themselves stuck in the mud. And a lot of that can be driven by fear of not making the right decision. So they do nothing.

Walter Storholt:

Yeah. I think I’ve heard that as paralysis by analysis. Something in that vein maybe.

Tyler Emrick:

Yeah. Oh, and we see it with retirees as well. Right? on the flip side where they’re may be looking to downsize, they don’t need the big space. All the kids are out of the house. They know they want to do it, but there’s a lot of memories that were in that house and that fear of the unknown and am I really going to be happy in a smaller space can really weigh heavily when you try to make those decisions. I think from an investment standpoint moving on from the housing concept, but when you think about a market where it has a lot of volatility or a lot of fluctuations, I hear often that, Hey, I haven’t even looked at my accounts. I don’t want to know how much I’m down. And when we start making those decisions, yes.

Tyler Emrick:

If not looking at your account as part of your investment process, right? Hey, I’m not looking at it, but every six months or once a year and making changes then to take the emotion out of it. Hey, that’s one thing. But if you’re not looking at your accounts because you are fearful of seeing that big down or pull back or seeing where the actual balance is. Well then it’s now we’re getting or making our decisions based off fear and emotion and not really looking at it from a logical standpoint of, okay, I might be down, but how can I approach my decision on should these be the investments that I want to continue to hold and am I in the right place as I looking forward six months or 12 months or 18 months down the road.

Walter Storholt:

Great thoughts there, Tyler, thanks for your perspective on that. By the way, if you have any questions as we go through the show today for Tyler or Kevin, or want to talk to a Certified Financial Planner and an experienced advisor on the True Wealth Team, you can go to truewealthdesign.com and click on the, “Are we right for you button?” and that’ll entitle you to a 15-minute call with an experienced advisor on the team. You can schedule right from your smartphone or computer again, go to truewealthdesign.com and we’ll link to that in the description of today’s show to make life easy on you. We’re talking about behavioral preferences, behavioral traps, some of these mindset shortcuts that we often fall victim to in our finances and in our planning for the future. Tyler, some good ones so far got another one on the docket.

Tyler Emrick:

You got it. Yep and we’ll move on to the final one here. So, all right, Walter, put you to the test. Final time, I promise.

Walter Storholt:

Now I find a million dollars. I’m just kidding.

Tyler Emrick:

You got it. I don’t know if you’re going to like this test as much, but we’ll see. So I might walk you through a little bit of an experiment and essentially going to give you the option to either take a bet or not. Okay. And it’s based off of a simple game. It’s just going to be a coin flip. So if I offered you a chance to say, all right, I’m going to flip a coin. If it lands on tails, I’ll give you 50 bucks or if it lands on heads, you give me a hundred bucks. Would you play?

Walter Storholt:

I don’t really like those odds or the payoff.

Tyler Emrick:

I had to go extreme Walter. I had to go extreme because I’m soliciting a specific answer here.

Walter Storholt:

I wouldn’t mind the game. I wouldn’t mind the consequence, but the benefit doesn’t outweigh the consequence, at least on my initial reaction.

Tyler Emrick:

Okay. So let’s say we flip it and ratchet it up a little bit. Let’s say, all right hey, we’ll offer to play the same game, coin flip. All right you get $200 from me if it lands on tails, if it lands on heads, you pay me a hundred dollars. How’s that?

Walter Storholt:

Okay. I feel like I’m falling right into the behavioral trap that you’re setting up, but okay, now I’ll play.

Tyler Emrick:

You got it, okay. I set it up pretty good. I like it. So yes, actually, so that is the experiment. There were two psychologists that actually proposed this same game to many individuals and they were recording the results. And what they found that is that nobody would, of course, played the game based off the first scenario that I brought up to you. The odds weren’t in their favor and they didn’t see it as a benefit to them. But once the payoff got about twice as much in that. So in that last scenario we just talked about, “Hey, I’d pay you 200. You’d only have to pay me.” Then individuals were willing to potentially have that loss to proceed forward with the bet.

Walter Storholt:

The odds of losing a hundred dollars didn’t change. I still have the same odds that I’ll lose a hundred, but at least it’s more worth that risk if the payoff is higher, if the ceiling is higher.

Tyler Emrick:

Absolutely. So what we call that or the behavioral trap that I’m bringing up here is called loss aversion. And what it means is essentially we are biased towards avoiding losses over seeking gains. And another way to put that is, that we don’t like to lose money and we don’t like to lose it even more than we like to see our accounts go up and we would like to see those gains. Okay.

Walter Storholt:

Makes sense. Yeah. I won’t feel worse today having not won the 200 or even the 50, but I’ll have felt like I had a bad day if I lost the hundred, I get that.

Tyler Emrick:

You got it. Now, the way that you can think about this again, is as we start thinking about practical application. Well, what are our behaviors that come at from this particular behavior trap? So I think the easiest one that I’ll start out with to think about is, well, we invest in safe investments or safe products, maybe leaving more in our savings account than what we need because we don’t want to see volatility or we don’t want to take on that perceived risk to get gain, even though a major topic in the news today is going to be inflation, it’s impacting all of us. So those savings accounts are not keeping pace with inflation. We know they’re not, but we don’t perceive the risk of investing worth it. So we overanalyze and keep that money in savings accounts or even a little bit more than we should.

Tyler Emrick:

Now. I think probably the biggest one, which is some of us may be going through right now is essentially holding onto a stock just because it’s at a loss. So you think about over the last 10 years, what’s really been good investments or have been the highest performers. And they’ve been these more expensive tech stocks, think of your Teslas of the world, your Microsofts of the world. And these things have been very good investments for the most part over the last 10 years. But if we think about since the beginning of this year and the selloff that the market’s had, these things have been disproportionately hit hard. So you might see if you have an individual stock position in Tesla or Microsoft, where you’re actually down a significant portion, much more than what the market’s down year to date.

Tyler Emrick:

And if you’re looking at that stock position and you’re saying, “I’m going to hold this and just wait for it to come back.” I mean, I think Kevin calls this, the “get even-it is”. And essentially like, I just don’t want to take that loss. We can find ourselves making that decision. And it’s more of an emotional one and not necessarily looking at the next 12 months saying, from a market standpoint, what types of investments do we think are going to do well and is this one it? It’s more so that, if I sell this, I’m going to realize that loss and I’m going to get out of it.

Walter Storholt:

Makes sense. Yeah. What did you call that one again?

Tyler Emrick:

Yep. So that one’s called the-

Walter Storholt:

Or the Kevinism.

Tyler Emrick:

Oh, the Kevinism I got, yeah. So, “get even-it is”.

Walter Storholt:

“Get even-it is”. Okay. I like it.

Tyler Emrick:

Right. Yeah. And it doesn’t have to necessarily be from a single stock position either. You can think of it from an overall portfolio view as well. I mean, I think when we go through volatile times like this, some families can find it hard to maybe make change because they don’t know or they don’t want to walk in losses or they just don’t want to make big changes when we have a lot of volatility in the market. And that’s okay, as long as you have a plan around that and you feel comfortable with the investments that you have and say, “You know what? These are the ones that are going to put me in the best position going forward.” It doesn’t matter what they have done over the last six months. And yes, I understand they’re down but more so these are where I want my money to be as I look six months, 12 months, 18 months down the road and you feel comfortable with that.

Tyler Emrick:

Because what’s happened in the past. I mean, it’s not going to tell us what’s going to happen in the future. So again, taking that emotion out of it, I think can be you extremely valuable as are looking at your investments, whether it be a single stock position or your overall portfolio and making changes is, as we see the volatility that we’ve had, it causes us to really focus on those investments that have lost money while really almost ignoring the ones that the other investments inside your account. Going back to Kevin and a lot of some of the previous podcasts that he’s done. I mean, he’s done a lot of work on the investment process that we take here. And I can’t remember which podcast it was exactly, but I know he’s made some mention of, when you look at your portfolio and you go through, there should be probably some winners and losers.

Tyler Emrick:

And if there’s not, if you’re not happy with at least one investment inside of your account, then you’re probably under diversified. And you probably have too many eggs in the basket per se, and you’re not looking and spreading out that risk because ideally when we experience the volatility that we have, we would like to see certainly some positions are going to go down, but some positions will hopefully act as a ballast and offset some of those losses, maybe even be up. So as you look at your portfolio and you look at those investments that you’re holding and doing a real deep dive, you’ll take that emotion out and don’t worry about necessarily the locking in losses, but be more focused on what’s going to happen over the next six months to 12 months and where do I want to be positioned?

Walter Storholt:

Really neat perspective. Tyler, thank you for detailing some of these different behavioral traps that are out there. Certainly feel like I’m identifying with a couple of these. So if I’m an investor or somebody listening to the podcast today and I’m going, “Oh man, I’m guilty of all of these things.” How do I reign these in, how do I balance being a human and having these natural reactions with making smart financial decisions? How can I, the namesake of the show, retire smarter given the fact that I have the tendency to maybe to fall into some of these traps?

Tyler Emrick:

So when I was doing some prep work for the podcast today, I ran into quite a bit of social psychologists, behavioral finance, this is the realm that we’re talking in right now. And I came across this idea of having a prepared mind quite a bit. And it essentially means we deliberately pause and reflect on both our current circumstances and potential paths forward. And that prepared mind concept really stuck with me. And I think it really helps wade through and identify when we’re falling into some of these traps. I mean, I’m a planner at heart, so I’m a Financial Advisor.

Tyler Emrick:

So it comes to no surprise I’m sure, to many of the people that know me and that are listening today, that I think having a plan or having that prepared mind is really going to help you as you’re making your decisions and trying to avoid some of these behavioral traps. And really you should have set time throughout the year where you’re talking through your goals, reviewing your investment expectations, and diving into some of those key accounts or key decisions that you have coming up and how they’re going to affect your retirement or whatever goal that you’re trying to accomplish.

Tyler Emrick:

And I think our industry or in our company here at True Wealth Design, that’s what we’re really trying to be, that trusted Financial Advisor that can help you in this effort. We don’t know what we don’t know. And those unknowns often are what get us into trouble. So the more conversations that you can have around that and the more conversations that you can have that help you really navigate the uncertainty and help you outline those pros and cons and make the best decision for you, whether that has some emotional ties to it or not. That’s okay, but at least you’re going into it with your eyes wide open and you can understand that, hey, this is the decision that I’m making. That’s going to put me in the best foot going forward.

Walter Storholt:

As always, it helps to have somebody coaching you through pitfalls, helping you avoid these behavioral traps among all the other retirement planning and financial planning, things that we talk about here on the show. And so if you want to get in touch and have a conversation about your specific situation, the best place to start is by going to truewealthdesign.com. And again, click on that, “Are we right for you?” button and you can schedule a 15-minute call with an experienced advisor on the team. Again, go to truewealthdesign.com and click, “Are we right for you?” to schedule that call. Or you can call the old-fashioned way, 855-TWD-PLAN, that’s 855-893-7526.

Walter Storholt:

You can also check the contact info in the description of today’s show to make life easy for you. Tyler, I really appreciate the help on the show today, your guidance, and for asking me some easier questions or more like just hypothetical situational things. So there wasn’t really a wrong answer to some of these. So I like those. Kevin’s always stumping me or catching me off guard with a question out of left field and sometimes throwing math at me and those kinds of things. So you kept it easy. You’re welcome back anytime my friend.

Tyler Emrick:

You got it. No, it was my pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Happy to have the conversation.

Walter Storholt:

Well, we’ll look forward to chatting with Tyler again on future episodes of Retire Smarter. Thank you again, Tyler. And thank you for listening to the show today. Again, don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions for Tyler, Kevin, and the True Wealth Design team, have a great week everybody. And we’ll talk to you again soon, right back here on Retire Smarter.

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