Behaviour and decisions
18 articles
How to Choose and Evaluate a Financial Advisor
Choosing an adviser is mostly a process of elimination, and the disqualifying signals are easier to check than the positive ones. Start with what would rule someone out, because that is where the verifiable evidence is.
6 min read
How to Evaluate a Financial Product Before Buying It
Most financial products can be assessed with the same short set of questions, regardless of what they are called. The questions are dull, they take about twenty minutes, and almost nobody asks them before signing.
5 min read
What a Market Drawdown Reveals About Your Real Risk Capacity
A questionnaire asks how you would feel if your portfolio fell. A falling market tells you what you actually do. The second is far harder to fake, and it is available only while it is happening.
7 min read
When DIY Personal Finance Is Enough — and When It Is Not
Most people's finances are simple enough to run themselves, and the parts that are genuinely hard are not the parts people expect. The question is not whether you are clever enough — it is whether your situation contains something that punishes a mistake.
6 min read
How to Evaluate Financial Advice from Finfluencers
The problem with financial advice on social media is not that the people giving it are stupid. It is that the format rewards confidence, brevity and novelty — three things that are close to the opposite of what good financial advice looks like.
6 min read
How Financial-Advice Fees and Conflicts Affect Investors
Advice that costs you nothing is being paid for by someone, and whoever pays shapes what you are told. Understanding how the money reaches your adviser explains most of the advice you will ever receive.
6 min read
What Financial Self-Reliance Means in Practice
Self-reliance is not wealth and it is not refusing help. It is the narrower and more achievable state of not being forced — into a job, a loan, a sale or a decision — by circumstances you did not choose.
6 min read
How FOMO Distorts Investment Decisions
The feeling that everyone else is making money is not irrational — it is a reasonable response to genuinely skewed information. What makes it dangerous is that the information reaching you is filtered in a way that guarantees the feeling.
6 min read
How Lifestyle Inflation Can Undermine Financial Progress
Spending rising alongside income is not a moral failure and not always a mistake. It becomes a problem through a specific mechanism — it raises the cost of the life you must fund forever, while feeling like nothing has changed.
8 min read
How to Overcome Analysis Paralysis in Financial Decisions
Waiting until you are certain feels like caution and behaves like a decision. In most financial choices the cost of delay is larger than the difference between the options you are agonising over.
5 min read
The Foundations of a Resilient Personal Financial Plan
A resilient plan is not one that maximises returns. It is one that survives the things that actually go wrong — job loss, illness, a death, a bad decade in markets — and most of what makes that possible has nothing to do with investing.
6 min read
How to Evaluate a Second-Income or Side-Hustle Plan
A second income is usually assessed on the revenue it might produce. The things that actually decide whether it was worth doing are the hours it consumes, the money it needs before it earns anything, and what it does to the income you already have.
6 min read
How to Recognise Financial Mis-Selling and Assured-Return Claims
Mis-selling rarely involves a lie you could point to. It works by emphasis, omission and timing — and by describing a product accurately while leaving out the sentence that would have changed your mind.
6 min read
Risk Aversion, Risk Capacity and the Cost of Avoiding Risk
How much risk you can tolerate and how much you can afford to take are different things, measured differently, and they frequently disagree. Most bad portfolios come from answering one question when the situation required the other.
6 min read
How to Start Financial Planning When You Feel Late
The arithmetic of starting late is genuinely worse, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. What changes is which levers still work — and several of the most powerful ones are available only to people who start later.
6 min read
What Should and Should Not Count in Your Net Worth?
Net worth is a simple subtraction that becomes misleading the moment you include things you will never sell, value things at what you hope they are worth, or forget the tax due when you finally cash something in.
7 min read
Why Market Timing Is Unreliable Even When Some Signals Work
We took the most popular timing rule in circulation, wrote it down before testing it, and ran it against staying invested across every fifteen-year stretch of the Indian market — with tax, with costs, and against a control designed to catch us fooling ourselves. The signal turned out to be real. It still lost every single time.
8 min read
Why Retirees Can Struggle to Spend Their Corpus
Decades of saving build a habit, and habits do not switch off on a retirement date. Many people who have saved enough still cannot bring themselves to spend it — and the reasons are structural as much as psychological.
6 min read