The Biggest DIY Investing Mistakes (And How To Avoid Them)

The Biggest Mistakes DIY Investors Make (0:00)

Brian: If you’re a do-it-yourself investor, this episode is for you.

Bo: Brian, I am so excited because today we’re going to talk about some of the biggest mistakes that we’ve seen do-it-yourself investors make and how to fix those mistakes so they don’t end up derailing your entire wealth building journey.

Brian: I’m Brian. He’s Bo, and this is the Money Guy Show, where two financial advisers help you figure out how to save and invest for your future. And with that, let’s dive right in.

Bo: Brian, the origin of this episode is we get a bad rap where people all the time assume that we are anti or against do-it-yourself portfolio managers and financial professionals, and that’s just not the case. We actually think that there is a place for do-it-yourself. There’s a lot of folks out there that are fantastic do-it-yourself investors.

Brian: You know, I’ll take us all the way back to 2006. That’s the year that we started podcasting. The whole purpose was I felt guilty that we had minimums, that we couldn’t work with people and a lot of people just needed help. How do you open up a Roth IRA? How do you make sure that you’re paying off your credit cards, that you’re budgeting, that you have emergency reserves? I was like, man, somebody needs to tell people how to do money better because there really is a better way to do money. That is the heart of why we created this show. So, we are all about you being empowered and becoming the best version of yourself. Because guess what? Yes, if you do this well, complexity is going to find you. So, we want to load you up so you can be your best version even as a do-it-yourselfer.

Bo: And it’s interesting with all the technological advancements that we’ve seen, 64% of folks say that they’re not currently working with a financial professional. Rather they’re able to find different sources, different mechanisms to get their financial information. If you look at this, there was a study done by the Employee Benefit Research Institute that said, okay, where do people get information from for retirement planning? Like how do they inform and educate themselves if they don’t use a professional? It’s interesting. A lot of folks get their advice from family and friends. A number of people do it from online resources or personal research. There are some that work with financial professionals, but there are also people who depend on their employer’s HR department. There are some people who strictly just watch financial commentators and media producers. And then as one of the metrics that I think has grown certainly over the last couple of years and I think will probably continue to grow, artificial intelligence is now becoming a real tool that can be used to answer financial questions.

Brian: But even if you’re using things like the growing trend of using artificial intelligence, you’re going to need to have knowledge because as we’ve seen using artificial intelligence even in our practice, there’s all kinds of echoes or phantoms or ghosts or things that just show up in the system. You’re like, where did that come from? So, today we’re going to cover the seven mistakes we see do-it-yourselfers make.

Bo: Yeah. What we’re going to do is walk through each of these seven common mistakes that we’ve seen over decades of working as advisers. We’re going to walk you through not only what the mistake is, we want to explain to you why in fact it is a mistake, and then we even want to show you how to fix it. What are the things that you should be aware of? And you can do sort of a self audit. Okay, if this is true, if this exists in my financial life, what are the things I can do to change it and improve it and not make that mistake moving forward? So, with that, let’s jump right into number one. And I see this one way too often.

Mistake #1: Too Many Overlapping Funds (3:40)

Brian: Too many overlapping funds. Now, look, I’ve shared with you guys that I had a family member at one of the holidays come up to me and asked me if I’d look at their 401(k). And I looked at the 401(k) and I was like, “What did you use to choose the funds that went into your 401(k)?” And they said, I’m keeping the gender out on purpose, they said, “Every fund that had growth in it, I chose. I got the growth one and the growth one and the growth one.” So I was like, well, yes, growth is a great objective, but that’s not a great choice because you see a lot of funds that have growth in the title will have a lot of overlapping holdings, meaning that the top holding in this fund is going to be the same top holding in this fund. That can create a problem.

Bo: Yeah. You know that we espouse and we talk all the time about diversification and why it can benefit you. A lot of people think if I just have a number of different holdings by default that’s going to mean I’m diversified. And that’s not necessarily the case even if you have a bunch of different mutual funds and a bunch of different ETFs. And here’s a real easy example. Let’s assume that you have investment A. And in investment A, you have five companies in this fund. You’ve got Acme, Cyberdyne, Wayne Enterprises, Stark Industries, and Dunder Mifflin. That’s investment A. That’s a great portfolio. You decide that you want to diversify and you’re going to add in some of investment B. Well, when you actually get into the underlying holdings, investment B holds Acme and Cyberdyne and Wayne Enterprises and Stark Industries and Weyland-Yutani. And so when you actually look at these two funds combined, even though you thought you were diversifying, there’s actually an 80% overlap between these investments based on the underlying holdings. We see this inside of do-it-yourself portfolios all the time. We see the number of holdings they have, but when you actually dive into what they’re truly exposed to, it’s really a whole bunch of the exact same thing with no real diversification at all.

Brian: So, here’s what the solution is: streamline your funds. Actually know what you own. The good news is a lot of the custodians out there, the big providers that are holding your Roth IRAs, that are holding your after-tax brokerage accounts, they will provide a tool to where you can type in all the ticker symbols and then compare and contrast how much overlap is going into this. Go do that exercise so that you’re not just ending up with a super concentrated portfolio that you think is diversified.

Bo: And then just as a quick little note, beware of funds out there that are really just closet index funds masked as something else. If you see that the top holdings in your mutual fund that you’re invested in look the exact same as the top holdings in the S&P 500, but the internal operating expense of yours is 10 times that of the S&P 500, perhaps you’d be better off buying the low-cost index fund. You’d be amazed just doing a little bit of work on the front end can save you substantially over the long term.

Brian: It’s almost like the saying: instead of trying to beat the market, just be the market and save the money on those internal expenses.

Mistake #2: Using the Wrong Investment Accounts (6:46)

Bo: All right, Brian, let’s talk about do-it-yourself investing mistake number two, and this is one we see all the time. It’s not using or not understanding the right accounts to use inside of your portfolio construction.

Brian: Yeah, guys, you hear us all the time. If you think about fundamentally the Financial Order of Operations, which is completely free to you if you go to moneyguy.com/resources, taxes play a big part in why we choose what we choose. And so if you think about Roth accounts, they are tax-free. Your 401(k)s, especially your employer accounts in the past, those have been tax-deferred. And then your after-tax accounts, those are your brokerage accounts, they have their own way of being taxed. Well, you’ve got to figure out how to navigate this so that you come out on the other end and keep as much money as possible while playing the tax game.

Why Asset Location Can Change Your Returns (7:33)

Bo: Yeah, we talk all the time about asset allocation, how you diversify and spread out your assets, but we also want to think about asset location. What types of investments do I hold in what type of accounts? Because it can have a material impact. Think about this case study. Let’s assume that you have Ivan the investor and Ivan the investor has two investments that he’s going to hold. He’s going to have an index fund that’s going to make 12% annually per year. It’s going to go up in value 12% per year. But then he also has a bond fund that’s going to pay a 5% dividend out to him at the end of every year. Well, let’s also assume that Ivan has two different investment accounts that he can have. He has a 401(k) and he has a brokerage account, $100,000 in each. So Ivan has some decisions to make in terms of how he structures his portfolio.

Brian: Well, this is where the education comes in. Index funds, especially equity index funds, are very tax-efficient. You have the dividends, but dividends right now are pretty low as a percentage of the total value, probably less than 3%. And then as long as you’re not selling or turning that portfolio over, that’s pretty much the only taxability. And dividends, we know, have a tax-favored status especially in after-tax accounts. Bonds, meanwhile, are taxed at ordinary income tax rates, meaning it’s not a favored tax rate. It’s your full marginal tax rate for both federal and state purposes. So, you can quickly see if you’re not paying attention to the taxation or structure, it’s going to have a difference in your performance.

Bo: So, let’s look at these two portfolios that Ivan can build. In option one, portfolio one, he can hold his index fund inside of his 401(k) and he can hold his bond fund inside of his brokerage account. Well, after one year of investing, his index fund would be worth $112,000. It went up by 12%. But his bond fund, because it was in a taxable account, because it paid that 5% dividend, and because that dividend is subject to ordinary income taxes, he’s only going to end up with about $3,400 of that $5,000 dividend. So if you look at his total return for the year, it’s only about 7.7%. Had he focused on asset location and instead held his bond fund inside the 401(k) and his index fund inside the brokerage account, now he would have a full 8.5% rate of return because he did not lose any of the return on the fixed income investment, the bond fund, to tax drag. Just by shifting which account holds which type of investments, he was able to increase his rate of return by almost a full percentage point.

Brian: Now look, I do want to clarify. Earlier I said index funds are very tax-efficient because there’s no cost unless you trade, except for the dividends. Well, in this example, we just didn’t even put the dividends in there. That’s just going to be gravy or whipped cream and a cherry on this sundae that we’re building. So you can see how and why this is so powerful. If you put the index fund in the brokerage account, because you haven’t sold it, you get to keep all of that appreciation. Meanwhile, the bond had a very steep tax headwind because it’s taxed every year at ordinary income tax rates. That’s the difference. That’s why one is 8.12% and the other one is 7.7%. The choices of tax location that you put in the accounts is what made that difference in performance.

Bo: So what’s the solution here? Well, we want you to actually think through your asset location. When I think about the different types of investments that I’m going to hold, I also want to think about what are the different buckets that I have available inside of my portfolio because each one of those buckets behaves differently. So the investments we hold in each should look different.

Brian: Yeah. So if we actually laid it out: the tax-free account, this is your Roth, let’s go ahead and face it, this is going to be your favorite child. We love it. There’s a reason that this is number five in the Financial Order of Operations. We love tax-free growth. So let’s load it up and stick it to the man as much as we legally can: put growth assets in that. If you think about tax-deferred, this is going to be, as we showed in the example, where your boring assets that are not tax-favored go. You probably want to put them in that traditional type account because they’re going to grow tax-deferred, meaning you don’t pay any income taxes while they’re in that 401(k) in the traditional sense, but then when you pull it out, you’re going to pay ordinary income tax rates. You know what makes a lot of sense? Put things that are already taxed at ordinary income tax rates, like your bonds or very conservative assets. These are tax-inefficient holdings. And then that after-tax account, this is where you can use tax-efficient index funds, and also think in terms of capital gains tax-favored rates and dividend tax-favored rates.

Mistake #3: Taking the Wrong Amount of Risk (12:46)

Bo: Think about that when you’re trying to figure out what to put in which account type. So we’re going through seven investing mistakes we see common do-it-yourself investors make. And this next one I think is something that all investors are likely susceptible to. And it’s not managing or not having a realistic view of risk. And we generally see this in a few different flavors because all of us as investors are often motivated by fear and greed. Those are the two emotions that take hold of us. And very often when we analyze someone’s portfolio and ask to take a look, we’ll see that they’re likely being way too aggressive. They take on too much risk or perhaps they forget to adjust their risk as they age, as their financial circumstances change. And when they do that, they leave themselves vulnerable to market volatility, likely at the very time when they ought to be dialing down the risk.

Brian: Yeah, I’ll just make a quick statement. Just because you have a high risk tolerance, meaning that you think, hey, I’m a cowboy, I can handle whatever risk comes my way, as you get older, you just might not have the time to recover. That’s what sadly you learn, the lesson of what’s the difference between risk capacity, meaning time to recover, versus risk tolerance. Just because you’re a cowboy, that cowboy just didn’t have enough time for the market to do what it needed to do.

Bo: So don’t go too aggressive. So oftentimes it’s the greed that leads us into that too aggressive posture. But the other emotion plays as well. Oftentimes our fear will cause us to be far too conservative. We end up playing it safe but not actually allowing our money to do what it can do to reach its full potential inside of our portfolio because we’re afraid of potential market losses.

Brian: We had a question we answered last week’s Q&A show where we had a young lady in her 20s who shared she had maxed out a Roth IRA but she had bought all bonds. I don’t know where she got that guidance but that is definitely too conservative for somebody in their 20s. And I know a lot of you when you’re starting out, if you don’t know how money works, what is perceived as safe in the short term, like bonds, like cash, can actually be really risky in the long term because it’s going to get eaten up by inflation. It’s just not going to perform and keep up and build your army of dollar bills in the long term. What’s perceived in the short term as very risky might actually be the backbone of your future financial success. So, don’t sleep on this delicate balance between being too aggressive and too conservative. That’s why I’ll never forget when I was helping out when I was on the school board back in Georgia, the account that most people defaulted to was the stable reserve fund. And when I was talking to some teachers, they were like, the representative that came out to the school was telling a lot of the teachers to go into the stable reserve fund. And I was like, why would they do that? I actually asked an industry insider. They’re like, “Well, because people like that the money’s guaranteed and then they never call and question when the markets are getting beat up.” And then you’re not there 20 years down the road when they realize how they got hammered. That broke my heart for all these teachers that were being sold a bad product. That’s why we try to educate the do-it-yourselfer. Understand this delicate balance between aggressive and conservative. There is a right way to do money.

How and When to Rebalance Your Portfolio (16:29)

Bo: And then recognize that it shifts through time because oftentimes you can be too aggressive or you can be too conservative, but sometimes you can just not pay attention and you can be far too hands-off. While it might have been okay for your portfolio to be very aggressive when you were younger, if it’s now 10, 15, 20 years in the future and you’ve never adjusted it, you’ve never thought about rebalancing, you’ve never thought about readjusting your risk, there’s a really good chance that you could be totally out of whack. So, how do you rectify this? What’s the solution? Well, at least on an annual basis, we want you to look at whether you should rebalance your portfolio. Should you think about re-calibrating the investments inside of your portfolio to better match where you are from both a risk tolerance and risk capacity standpoint today? Now, rebalances shouldn’t look super aggressive. They should not be knee-jerk. You shouldn’t be 80/20 this year and 20/80 next year. You’re likely doing it wrong if that’s the way you’re navigating it. Instead, you should try to mimic what a lot of target retirement funds do. There should be a glide path that you move along that slowly adjusts through time so that as you get closer to your financial destination, as you get closer to financial independence or closer to retirement, you begin to get less and less aggressive, more and more conservative, more assets readily available. So that when the markets are out there freaking out, when we go through that inevitable two downturns in every decade, you’re not terrified, you’re not frightened, because you have an allocation that is appropriate for where you are in your financial life.

Mistake #4: Forgetting Your Beneficiaries (17:51)

Brian: You know, Bo, when we meet people and we find out that they have big things going on in their life, whether it’s they’re getting married or they just had a baby or something, we ask questions like, “Do you have wills? Do you have life insurance?” But another overlooked thing that fits right into the same conversation is mistake number four: forgetting to update your beneficiaries. A lot of you are going to have big employer plans. If you think about the first account for millionaires that crosses into seven figures for the majority of Americans out there, it’s your 401(k). So, these are going to be big accounts. It’s also going to be the one where the pump is primed. Your employer is going to give you 50 cents on the dollar or dollar for dollar matches on these things. So, they’re going to grow quite quickly. If you have big life changes and you’re not updating the beneficiaries, you’re missing out.

Bo: Yeah, it’s a terrifying statistic that only 36%, only one out of three parents, have designated beneficiaries not only on their retirement accounts but also on their life insurance policies. If you’re someone out there who’s getting married or having kids or there are circumstances changing, you want to make sure that these accounts that were specifically designed and constructed to pass outside the probate process, outside of the will, accurately reflect your wishes. Because we never know when that proverbial bus is going to hit us on a Tuesday afternoon. So, you want to make sure these accounts are updated so that your dollars will pass to the people you want them to in the way that you want them to.

Brian: Well, also don’t forget that beneficiaries on these accounts get tax-favored status in a lot of ways. If you inherit an IRA, you get 10 years of grace on the tax bill. And if you think about a child that is developmentally delayed, they have written in that this becomes a stretch IRA. That only happens if you structure the beneficiary correctly on those retirement accounts. So if you want the tax-favored stuff that comes out of these accounts, that the government and tax policy have written in to get this favored status, make sure you’re updating those beneficiaries to reflect that.

Bo: Yeah, that’s the solution. And we want you, again, maybe it’s annually, maybe it’s every couple years, to review the beneficiaries on your accounts. And you ought to think through every time you have a significant life event. If you go through a marriage or a divorce, if you have children through birth or adoption, if your spouse passes away, if one of your family members passes away, if you retire, or if something in your life changes, it’s always a good idea to review all the beneficiaries on not only your life insurance policies but also all your retirement accounts. And it’s not even a bad idea if you’re someone who’s in the habit of doing an annual net worth statement, which you should be doing, to list those beneficiaries on the footnotes so that it’s a reminder to you every year when you update your annual net worth to also go review those beneficiaries to make sure they still align with and match your ultimate wishes.

Mistake #5: Losing Track of Investments (20:44)

Brian: Now, that leads to our do-it-yourself mistake number five. You know, we are fortunate, Bo, that we get to record Making a Millionaire. And one of the things that we do when we do that is we help these people who come on our show kind of go through an inventory and create a net worth statement. It is shocking how many times we have come across accounts that they forgot about. And losing track of your investments is a sad, sad thing. I want to give you a stat here that’ll give you some context and perspective. According to Capitalize, there are roughly 31.9 million lost 401(k) accounts. Americans have $2.1 trillion, that’s trillion with a T, in forgotten retirement savings.

Bo: Guys, it is already hard to retire. But if you’re just leaving money behind, first of all, there’s a potential, if your account is not big enough that your employer is forced to keep it, they could just distribute this money out, creating not only a taxable situation but a penalty situation. This is bad stuff. Be an active participant in your financial life. The average American actually changes jobs 12 times on average in their career with a median tenure of just under about four years. So, it’s really easy to lose track of these accounts. If you have 12 different employers that you’ve worked with and they have 12 different 401(k)s, when you begin to look at your balance sheet or look at your financial life, it almost looks like a patchwork quilt of days gone by. So, there’s a really easy process. You can go to the Department of Labor’s retirement savings lost and found database to check and see right now if you have 401(k)s that might be sitting out there. Maybe you’re someone who when you were younger, you got really motivated and you were excited to go open up a Roth IRA or a traditional IRA and maybe you funded it, but then life happened and you got married and you moved on and now it’s five, seven, 10 years in the future and you’re rethinking about your financial life and you open new accounts and all of a sudden you have a bunch of different IRAs or a bunch of different taxable accounts and a bunch of different custodians all over the place. When you have your entire financial life spread out so much, it’s really, really easy to lose track of it. So, one of the things you ought to consider is whether there’s a way for you to consolidate accounts. Is there a way for you to bring together all those after-tax brokerage accounts? Is there a way for you to consolidate pre-tax IRAs into other pre-tax IRAs, Roth IRAs into other Roth IRAs? Those are relatively easy.

What to Do With Old 401(k)s (23:20)

Bo: But the one I think most people don’t do, the one that most people leave behind because truthfully it’s probably the most arduous because it’s not often as easy as just going to a website and downloading paperwork, is those old employer retirement accounts.

Brian: Yeah. That’s why I would encourage you to really make these decisions right after you change jobs. Consider as part of your transition into your next phase of life or next career or job opportunity: don’t leave those assets behind. If you go to moneyguy.com/resources, we actually have a great decision matrix to help you analyze whether you need to just leave it at your existing employer, roll it to the new employer, or even just roll it into an IRA. Just be an active participant so you don’t fall into the trap of having abandoned assets or assets that are not even updated. That’s the other thing that we see all the time. How often do we get a prospect whose 401(k) investment-wise reflects what was going on in that decade that they worked there and never got updated, never got brought in to modernize and reflect into the total portfolio of the assets.

Bo: Your dollars are just so powerful. You don’t want to leave any of them idly standing by. You want them to be actively working towards your great big beautiful tomorrow.

Mistake #6: Trying to Time the Market (24:37)

Bo: All right, Brian. We’re talking about these common investing mistakes we see do-it-yourselfers make. And this next one, I’m surprised it wasn’t the top of the list because this is the one that everyone would guess. And even though we all know it, and even though it’s become so familiar that we’ve almost gotten callous to it, people still try to do it. People still try and fail. And that mistake is trying to time the market.

Brian: Do you think it’s trying to time the market or is it just crying uncle? Because it’s back to earlier in the show we were talking about the relationship of fear and greed and I feel like this is not one that is a gaming decision. It’s more of when do you emotionally get to the point that you say, you know what, I didn’t know that I could lose this much money this fast. And people look for the exits. It’s not one of these deliberate things. It’s usually people reacting. And that’s why a lot of our education and our content is to educate you because I always worry about this: we talk about the powers of compounding growth a ton on this show, but it only works if you stay the course. If you let the first downturn or the first bear market where you’re going to lose 20% of your assets rattle you to the point that you head for the exits, guys, that is a disaster. And we have the stats to prove it.

Bo: Yeah. If you actually think about the numbers, consider an investor who was going to invest $10,000 in the S&P 500 starting in 1987 and was going to stay invested all the way till the end of 2025. So we’re talking about a roughly 40-year investment horizon here, an entire working life cycle. That $10,000 just left invested untouched in the market would have turned into $616,000. But if that investor would have just got nervous in one year, maybe it was in 1987, maybe it was during the 2000s, maybe it was during the Great Recession, and just decided to sit out just one year and they happened to miss the best year, the recovery year following those scary times, that $10,000 would have only turned into about $448,000. If they missed the best three consecutive years, that $10,000 turns into only $273,000. If they missed the five best years in that 40-year timeline, that $10,000 instead of turning into $616,000 would have only turned into $175,000. Trying to time the market and getting it wrong, or exiting too soon, or missing out on the upside can be unbelievably costly to your long-term financial independence.

Brian: I love this chart, but I also don’t think it gives complete context because I think nobody chooses to be out of the market that next year or three years or five years. What this is, is what I’ve seen really happen. You’re in a bad market and you’re like, I just need the pain to stop. Take 2008. I had a client, she was the only client I lost, and she called me and it was like November of 2008. She’s like, I just can’t take this. And it’s never things don’t happen just one at a time. They happen all together. She had a sick relative. There was the stock market getting its teeth kicked in. We were dealing with the whole election process. It just seemed like everything and anything was going on. She calls me up and says she’s got to get the heck out. So you relieve the pain. You pull the parachute and you get out. And then the market starts recovering and you’ve now missed a year when it had that huge recovery and you’re like, well, crap, now I missed a year. And then you close your eyes another three years and now three years are gone. You’re like, well, I’ve got to wait for the next bear market because I know there’s going to be two every decade. That’s how you end up getting yourself in this situation. You headed for the exits, you couldn’t find your way back in, the market recovers, and not only did you feel the pain going down, but you’re feeling the pain as everybody else is recovering. It is painful, guys. And that’s what I often remind people: the solution to this is to take the emotions completely out of it. Understand asset allocation and diversification because once you get the mix right, you can then shift to what I always say: always be buying. If you just have a consistent mechanism where you’re buying through the process, not only does it power you through this so you can get all the compounding growth, but also the Financial Mutant portion of your brain gets activated to where when the market is down, you’re like, it’s okay, I’m getting a 20% discount. And then as those shares stack on top of each other, you come out on the other side that much healthier and better for it.

Why You Should “Always Be Buying” (29:20)

Bo: That mechanism helps remove the emotion from the equation. Let’s take the worst investing period in modern stock market history, the Great Depression. Over a 25-year period, the market was basically flat. It finished $2 higher 25 years in the future than it did 25 years prior. So if you would have been an investor there, you wouldn’t have made any money if you just bought on day one and held it until the end of year 25.

Brian: However, had you been an investor that would have been dollar cost averaging every single year, dollar cost averaging sounds so unsexy. ABB: always be buying through that entire period of the Great Depression. That feels different than dollar cost averaging.

Bo: Yep. If you’d have been doing that rather than being flat over that 25-year period, you actually would have annualized almost 12% a year. So if you can remove the emotions, stay consistent, stay the course, and let your dollars do what they do, even in uncertain times, even in trying times, even in scary times, you can come out on the other side better off for it, if you can always be buying.

Brian: And look, we’re showing you the Great Depression, but then you notice the chart continued on. I think it’s pretty exciting in the fact that I truly believe in this law of accelerating returns, meaning that there is so much innovation going on that the things that will happen in the next 10 years will be what something that took us 30 to 40 years in the past because it is actually speeding up. We’re figuring out ways to make more productivity, more money, and more things out of the resources we have. The chart shows it. Look at what has happened. And yes, we made it through the Great Depression, but this thing even with volatility is stacking upon stacking. Don’t try to outsmart the market. Don’t try to beat the market. Just be the market. And especially embracing always be buying, you’re going to be better for it.

Mistake #7: Staying DIY for Too Long (31:20)

Bo: Now, this whole show we walked through common mistakes that we’ve seen do-it-yourself investors make, but we still think there’s a lot of folks that are do-it-yourself investors that should stay do-it-yourself investors. There are a lot of people who that’s what makes sense and they can continue doing that. But one of the mistakes that we do see, and this is realistically a mistake, is that for some folks they reach the point where they decide, hey, I’m just going to stay do-it-yourself and they don’t recognize they’ve likely hit that critical threshold, that stage of their financial life where it might make sense to ask for help.

Brian: And look, a lot of you are watching this content and you’re like, that’s not me. You’re perfectly fine with that. So, I think we want to go ahead and put some prompts in here so you would recognize when this mysterious thing that Brian keeps talking about, that complexity will find you, is a legitimate thing. Your tax situation, your estate situation, your retirement, your education plan, there will come a point where things are just overwhelming. That’s one of the wakeup calls.

When a Financial Advisor May Make Sense (32:29)

Bo: Yeah, there’s generally one of three things or a combination. One is exactly what you said. Complexity just shows up and you don’t know what you don’t know. The second is we just get busy and life happens and all of a sudden the stuff that’s supposed to be top of mind for us begins falling to the back burner. We don’t update our beneficiaries. We’re not rebalancing our portfolio. We’re not thinking about asset allocation. Those things fall to the back burner. Or we’ve just had so much success that the gravity of our decisions has now moved from the point to where we used to have $10 decisions that would affect us, and now we have $100,000 decisions. If one of those describes you, or maybe a combination of those describes you, the correct solution for you at this stage might be to consider hiring a financial professional.

Brian: But look, and we have a whole become a client page that you can go to. We’ll leave the porch light on for you. But I still want to bring it back full circle. If none of that reflects upon you and you’re just not at that point, please take advantage of all of our free stuff because it makes me so happy that we have been planting seeds of success since 2006. If you go to moneyguy.com/resources, I think you’ll see the heart that we really do want you to be the best version. And that’s why when we create this content, we want to load you up, build the success. I’m so confident in the system that I know that complexity is right around the corner, and there’s no ask of you except to just go be the best version of yourself. Come become a client when you’re ready. I’m your host Brian, joined by Mr. Bo. Money Guy Team, out!