00:00Carl, you've spent your career helping people recognize the gap between what we should do with our money and what we actually do with our money.
00:08What's your tried and true financial advice that's withstood the test of time about what we should actually do?
00:16It's such a good question because the challenge is getting clear about what actually matters to you.
00:24So many of us are basing our financial decisions, our investment decisions, our financial planning decisions around other people's goals, right?
00:32And this has only gotten harder since we've got the comparison machine, Instagram, telling us all the time what our goals should be.
00:40So I think the best thing you can do is just take a beat, right?
00:45Can you take a minute and figure out, is this my goal?
00:48Is this my mom's goal?
00:49Is this my brother-in-law's goal?
00:51Like whose goal is this that I'm investing or saving or planning my money for?
00:58What about if I know my goals that I'm not comparing them to other people's?
01:02I know what I want to achieve and maybe I don't track the market.
01:06So I'm not necessarily in tune with the volatility or the gains or the highs or the bounce off the lows, but maybe I'm still overwhelmed by finances.
01:16What would you tell me in that situation or someone in that situation?
01:20Yeah, whenever, and this is sort of some of the work from complexity theory, whenever things feel complex, right?
01:29Just try, whenever things feel risky, uncertain, complex, make them simpler, right?
01:36So if I felt overwhelmed, I would be looking around, let's first get clear about things that actually matter, right?
01:44Chances are, whenever we feel overwhelmed, we're probably worried about some things that actually don't matter.
01:50Those are the easy things to cross off the list, right?
01:53I remember a client of mine years ago, an older lady, her favorite hobby was knitting.
02:00She called me in the late 90s because she was worried about a skirmish in the Middle East.
02:05I mean, her investments were super safe.
02:07The skirmish in the Middle East matters to some people, but it didn't matter to her living in rural Utah, right?
02:13You don't need to worry about that.
02:15The second thing I would do is think about things that you can't control.
02:17Like, anything I can't control, I can remove from my list of worrying about, right?
02:23If I can't control currency or what somebody may or may not announce about tariffs, it's not something I can worry about,
02:31except to the degree that I make decisions about my portfolio.
02:34So get rid of the things that don't matter.
02:36Get rid of worrying about things that you can't control.
