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Some Clients Feel Fear, Anxiety, and Worry More Than Others The tendency to feel worry, fear, and anxiety is normally distributed. Practically, this means that some of your clients will tend to experience these negative emotions more frequently than others, regardless of your efforts to help them become “fearless” investors, budgeters, etc. We refer to the tendency to feel negative emotions in an investing context as volatility composure, and it is related to neuroticism (also …
Clients have various characteristics that influence their investment decisions. Many advisors understand that a significant part of the value of working with clients is helping them manage their mindset when it comes to investing. However, understanding investor psychology requires knowing what to measure. In the following text, we will examine several characteristics that can influence a client’s overall investor psychology, also known as behavioral risk tolerance. By measuring investor personality, advisors can identify which …
If you are a consumer of personal finance content like I am, you have by now undoubtedly heard one commentator or another derisively dismiss the idea of even mentioning the long-term cost of a daily Starbucks trip. They don’t want to hear about it—it’s a trope to be ignored. And this derision is coming from otherwise competent and professional personal finance sources. This phenomenon got me thinking: what’s going on here? Surely Commentator X …
Let’s Agree to Disagree Agreeableness is a personality trait that is often overlooked or misunderstood when managing our financial lives. The field of personality psychology generally recognizes five primary personality traits that are understood to form the basic foundation of individual personality (often referred to as “the Big Five” or “OCEAN model”). These include openness to experience, extroversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and agreeableness. Here we take a closer look at the last trait, agreeableness. We …
One of the hallmarks of a millionaire-next-door client is that they use their resources wisely. The “frugality chapter” of The Millionaire Next Door highlighted how frugality was part of the millionaire journey of small business owners, c-level millionaires, and others. If you’re familiar with the books, many continued those practices even after they passed the $1 million mark. The Science of Frugality In general, the more frugal you are, the more likely you will …