The business of advice

I’ve been working with a lot of people making decisions on their tender offers these past couple of weeks. I’ve written a lot about how hard the business of advice is. Lots of people feel as if they don’t need help, and unfortunately those are most often the people that need the most help.

Secondly, lots of people seek advice as a transaction - something comes up and they have an immediate need and they want someone to answer their questions and be done with them. The best financial advice is not transactional and is more long-term, just like investing.

Of course, most importantly underlying everything is trust. There’s just a general distrust of a lot of advisors out there and I get it. In this day and age, we have Tik-Tok advisors tell you to do illegal things and yolo your savings to get rich. It’s a brutal stigma.

All the above issues with the business of giving advice, often leads to clients coming to us who have been given just straight up shit advice. Simple and minor calculation errors can lead to thousands of dollars of extra taxes. People are convinced what they’re doing is the right decision and end up making a bad that could go horribly wrong.

Sometimes we’ll work with people who want to get things corrected. But often times I feel like I’m speaking to a brick wall and speaking to someone who wants to hear what he wants to hear.