Bullshit on Stilts: Tackling the bullshitology of financial decisions.
Join two financial brains turned podcast hosts unleash their wit and wisdom drawing on vast financial backgrounds. Using highly-tuned bullshit sniffers they call out the clichés, crap spackle and flapdoodle spewed by so-called experts across the landscape of financial advice. Identifying as doctors of bullshitology you can count on your hosts to bring you a lively if not deadly mix of serious analysis, hijinx, and tomfoolery. All within a 99.1% bullshit free safe space.
Bullshit on Stilts: Tackling the bullshitology of financial decisions.
Bullshitting ourselves? But of course!
Delving into the area of why many people deny, delay, and defer critical financial decisions. Mark and Keli get into observations of what maybe going on behind the curtains of a consumer's decision-making procrastination?
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Developing your financial bullshit sniffer one episode at a time.
welcome to bullshit on stilts, a podcast hosted by two guys with vast financial backgrounds and great bullshit sniffers who call out the cliche crap, spackle and flapdoodle spood by so-called experts across the landscape of financial advice identifying as doctors of bullshit ology. You can count on your steam hosts maybe knuckleheads to bring you a lively, if not deadly, mix of serious analysis, hijinks and tomfoolery, all within a 99.1% bullshit-free safe space. Let's get after it. How do people bullshit themselves? How do people bullshit themselves? Because there's a lot of folks out there and I think the primary operating mentality of our human being species is that we're probably the biggest bullshitters on stilts to ourselves. So how does that present itself when it comes to financial decision making? And really it's about maybe some self-control or self-discipline. You want to comment on that, mark?
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, we've got to get over this Lake Wobegon thing that we are all above average and all good-looking. This ain't so I'm sorry, what? So we think that, for example, in managing risk, this won't happen to me, or I'll start tomorrow. And managing risk, this won't happen to me or I'll start tomorrow and all of these things come into play that are just rationalizations as a way of protecting ourselves from what we know is a potential train wreck based on our own behavior. So I think there's a tremendous amount of deferral, deflection, denial, that goes into us bullshitting ourselves and it all comes down to I'll start tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Do you think that's driven by a fear of being sold something you don't need from a financial related decision or choice? Is that why people defer decisions? Is it because they're fearful that they'll make the wrong decision? So no decision is better than making a wrong decision? Where do you think that comes from?
Speaker 2:Oh, I think that's very valid, because there is something called decision regret. Sure, and studies have shown too many options won't make a decision. And then when you do make a decision, there's decision regret. How does a person avoid decision regret? You think through the decision-making process Each step. Do other options exist? Now you're starting to solidify and coalesce around something that might actually make some sense. Yeah, and keep consistently applying whatever it is we decided to do.
Speaker 1:So that's a component right, just fearing of making the wrong decision. Another component is that I'm too busy having fun with the money I earn to save any of it, to put it aside for whatever reason, whether it's retirement, whether it's paying for an estate plan, whether it doesn't matter. But most people don't do that. They don't stop their spending in order to save a little bit. And people are typically spend first, save second. Personality types Some people save first, spend second and the interesting thing is one gentleman told me years ago it's always the first group that spends first, save second. That works for the second group, the savers that save first and spend second.
Speaker 2:And that's an anomaly, and I think it's dispositional, in other words, I mean it's psychological. They're just of that ilk, and there are others that go out and spend and I think, it's very difficult to get from a dispositional standpoint people to change.
Speaker 1:Sure, that's a behavior issue. So I had a person I was working with. Their comment to me was you know, one of our big goals is to be able to save up enough money annually to be able to take a really nice spring break trip with the family. We've never done that. We'd really like to do that.
Speaker 1:In working through their finances, it became apparent that every month they were spending $560 a month on gaming profiles. So what did they do when they came home? Month on gaming profiles? So what did they do when they came home? Mom, dad, kids they all got on their PlayStation fours, threes, xbox, whatever logged into their paid gaming account to then game, essentially to enjoy themselves, leisure and so forth. So my comment to them was you can't afford a $6,000 trip a year because you're spending $6,000 a year on leisure activity called digital gaming, and so they're unable to save because they're simply spending without thought, and the only thought they could come up with is not to get rid of that, but how do we make more money? That was really their first approach to that not to exhibit self-control, not to save first, spend second, but spend first and then complain that we don't have enough money saved to face an emergency expense that comes down the pipe.
Speaker 1:Think this through.
Speaker 2:If they thought the solution was we'll just go make more money, and that is true, but Do you think that will really translate into savings, or will it just be more spending without the thought, which is what the pattern has been?
Speaker 1:Behavior trumps it all, so behavior will that'll trump it.
Speaker 1:They will spend the additional money almost to a guaranteed level. One of the reasons and we've all heard this money doesn't create happiness. It actually creates more decisions than anything else, but it doesn't create happiness. Creates more decisions than anything else, but it doesn't create happiness. And just because you're earning more, there's a whole bunch of pent up spending that you haven't done because you couldn't afford it. Now you unlock that 10 to one says there's a couple of snowmobiles in the trailer in the driveway for this couple. Just because of the way they operate, they also say well, that's not going to happen, we're not going to live that long. Whatever, it is to rationalize why they're spending everything now. And the most crestfallen people I've ever met were the people that took on the perfect plan that's not going to happen to me. I'll never live that long. I know when I'm going to die. And then they live beyond that expectation and they have nothing prepared beyond that point. But boy did they enjoy that money while they were younger.
Speaker 2:So I think there are latent attributes that, if addressed properly, can get people to change their thinking, therefore their behavior. Let me build this out just a bit. So stay with me on this. Money doesn't buy happiness, but it does give us access to what brings us happiness, or what we've told does, and that's spending, buying stuff. So, while money itself doesn't the energy in money and there is a currency it allows us to go do the stuff that does bring us happiness, or at least so we think which is all stuff, yeah, and that's been inculcated into us through marketing for decades. Oh yeah, spend, spend, spend. Yep, you got problems? Just go spend more money.
Speaker 1:That's right. Whatever your problem is in life, there's a product to make it better, to make it better.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. We certainly attempt to lower the bullshit factor right and we call a spade a spade. If you're 55, you want to start planning for retirement and you intend to retire at 65. You can have anything you want. You just can't have everything. And if you fail to plan, don't plan to retire. And if you plan to retire, then plan to be at some point impoverished because you didn't do what you needed to do.
Speaker 1:And some people don't want to hear that, but it's probably some of the most functional information if they're receiving it, that helps them choose maybe a different path. It might be you retire from your career with every intention to pick up a second career. Maybe it's consulting, because you have one of those backgrounds that everybody's looking for your intellectual brawn. But you don't have to work 50, 60 hours a week for the corporation anymore as an example, retiring just so you can get a job. Well, that dog ain't going to hunt.
Speaker 1:People have this tendency to use the perfect plan, to use the that's not going to happen to me as a rationalizing event I think you said this before to just defer, procrastinate on a decision. It was nice, it didn't feel right. So I'm not going to do anything, but let me think about it. And they never address that pressing issue that they originally wanted to address because they couldn't get over the fear of making a bad decision. The fear of having 150 bucks a month not being in the check-in account because it's going into a life insurance policy, as an example, the fear of having to go on a financial diet in order to have your cake and sort of eat it too, down the road which is planning, saving first, paying yourself first, as well as taking care of the stuff that is part of the everyday lifestyle.
Speaker 1:I probably encountered more people in my career that said, hey, I don't want to know all that, I just need to find someone to do it for me. I've never encountered one of those types of personalities that were ever willing to get serious about understanding what the decisions they're facing, what they imply, because they're just looking for someone that they kind of like almost like it's a dating approach. If I like you we had a good conversation I trust you. Here's all my money. Take care of it the way you see fit. Don't make me answer questions, because I just don't know any of this stuff. What do you think? Tell me what to do. It's in those relationships that people are taken advantage of yes Very frequently.
Speaker 1:And then they say woe is me, I didn't know that, they didn't tell me that. Yet every time you met them for the last seven years you said I don't understand this, I don't get it, Just do what you think is right for me. But then when you find out something's wrong or whatever, shame on them, not on you. So you're bullshitting yourself. You made the decision to remain ignorant and not give a damn with the express intent to maintain the right to be disappointed and take that person to arbitration or whatever the case might be. That's easier than spending a little time learning how to be better at making your own decisions, excluding product and service sales.
Speaker 1:Big difference huge difference but we can't and we don't make people do things. They either will or they won't.
Speaker 2:What we're looking for, frankly, for the podcast are people that truly do want to get the bullshit off the stilts, and that has to do with what we perceive, how we integrate what we hear, the bullshit, how we protect ourselves from it and how we address the worst bullshit which is within us. Yeah, and say, look, I'm ready to get real here. What do we need to do? Well, that's the last part of it is what do we need to think about? What do we need to correct? How do we set up a new way of thinking, Because the old way of thinking that got you into trouble is not the same mindset and way of thinking that's going to get you out of trouble.
Speaker 1:We find that when people get to talk to experts and collaborate and brainstorm with them, throwing good ideas, bad ideas, on the table, talking about it, the sense that I can is that all there is to this. You mean, are you kidding me? That takes the chalk blocks out from underneath the race car tires. In many instances, when the profile of the individual is, I need to get busy. I'm tired of being tired. I know I can do this. I just need an ally on my side of the table, not trying to sell me crap, but helping me translate all this French from financial services into a language I get.
