Clarity for a New Year

With the year almost in the rearview mirror, I wanted to share with you what you can expect from DataPoints in the new year. Our team is focused on providing our advisor clients tools to uncover client money mindset, personalize advice and guidance, and apply the psychology of financial planning. Focus: Identifying Client Money Mindset If you’re a small business owner like us, you know it is tempting to be all things to everyone. …
BFinancial services as an industry is moving at warp speed to embrace psychology. The trick is that we have a definition problem when describing the field that encompasses the mind, behavior, and money. If you look at the media coverage of finance and psychology, most content focuses on cognitive errors in decision-making related to investments. In other words, most of the media and most financial services concentrate on behavioral finance. However, this focus is …
“My neighbor is driving me crazy. She always says she’s the most frugal person she knows, but she’s spending every dime on *&#$* at Target. It’s not frugal. It’s stupid.” A friend recently shared this sentiment with me, and it is an excellent example of the fact that some of us aren’t great at evaluating our own personal characteristics. Some of us lack self-awareness when it comes to specific attributes about ourselves. Frugality is …
In his “Intelligent Investor” column in the September 7, 2019 print edition of the Wall Street Journal, Jason Zweig wrote about an idea that we’ve thought about a good deal in the recent past: the fact that not all risk tolerance assessments are created equal. In the piece, Mr. Zweig—himself an accomplished and noted author regarding topics related to the intersection of money and our brains—takes specific aim at what some have referred to …
Sometime around 2000, I gambled some of my money away while fooling myself into thinking I was doing something very sophisticated. I wasn’t in Las Vegas: I was sitting at my computer buying shares of Krispy Kreme Donuts on eTrade. I had seen the front page of Forbes or Fortune or some other publication touting the company’s success and its future prospects, and decided on my own, without seeking the counsel of my wiser …

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