Lack of professional financial advice can prove costly later: Pay for services, seek help
Summer holidays involved a houseful of hungry children to feed all day. She made it all seem effortless even if she was adamant about toiling alone in the kitchen. It was only after we cousins grew up to manage our kitchens that we appreciated what it took to feed a family.
When we asked her why she oversimplified the task, she could not explain. That is how I felt, she said. Do we think something is easy or tough based on our perception? Is my friend underestimating the complexity of the task for his lawyer and, therefore, dismissing it?
I know of many well-paid professionals, who leave their money uninvested in their savings bank accounts.
They sheepishly admit to not doing anything about it. At least it is safe, even if it earns nothing, they claim. Yes, that is a denial and coping statement for inaction.
Many of them have suffered because they thought it was not a difficult task to choose the right avenues to invest in. They would come around to doing it soon, they assured me, and, no, they wouldn’t take any help. They disliked paying for advice.
It seemed like a large sum to them, even if the idle money would have earned enough to pay for the advice. We don’t realistically estimate what might be at stake. What we see is the immediate outcome and we focus on that.
That might be the default position for young children, whose prefrontal cortex is still under development. They may be incapable of thinking for the long term; or evaluating action and consequence; or making a choice that places the larger and bigger interest ahead of the immediate and foreseeable pain. But why is it that adults systematically mix up capital and revenue, cost and benefit, short and long term, reward and risk?
We are limited in our
