Attitudes that Destroy Your Wealth
14 Nov 2022 · 41 min
Mel Abraham breaks down eight cognitive biases that tank your wealth: overconfidence, sunk-cost thinking, loss aversion, and others. He shows how these mental errors shape your money decisions, then gives concrete fixes like building exit rules into your plan, seeking advisors who disagree with you, and using data instead of gut feel.
Chapters
Hey there, real quick, before we jump into the episode, listen, if your earnings.
Treadmill hasn't set you free yet, running faster won't either. Listen, hustle without principles just going to burn you out.
So here's what I want for you. I want you to join me for my money machine experience live. It is three free trainings. Deep dive into how to escape the treadmill and build a money machine that.
Actually works for you.
All right, Grab your spot here by going to moneymachinelive.com and I'll see you.
In the free training.
Your attitude might be the very thing that's holding you back from financial freedom and wealth.
Now I get it.
You might be going, what the hell are you talking about? Mel, here's the deal. You've heard me say over and over again that most people don't have money.
Issues, they have behavior issues, and that wealth is built on behaviors. Well, if wealth is built on behaviors, behaviors are built on thinking. Okay, well, thinking is affected by attitudes.
And in this episode of the affluent entrepreneur show, we're going to talk about a number of attitudes or biases that come into play that can absolutely rob you blind and what to do instead.
So I look forward to seeing the episode and seeing how we can move you forward. Seeing the episode.
This is the absolute entrepreneur show for entrepreneurs that want to operate at a high level and achieve financial liberation. I'm your host, host Mel Abraham, and I'll be sharing with you what it takes to create success beyond wealth so you can have a richer, more fulfilling lifestyle. In this show, you'll learn how business and money intersect so you can scale your business, scale your money, and scale your life while creating a deeper impact and living with complete freedom, because that's what it really means to be an absolute entrepreneur.
Hey there.
Welcome to this episode of the affluent entrepreneur show.
Have you ever heard this? Boy, do you have an attitude problem?
I know that I've heard it, heard it growing up. I hear it even now sometimes. But here's what I mean by this.
The question is really, do you have a money attitude problem?
And I think actually a lot of us do, including myself. I am not exempt from this. Here's the reality is you've heard me say before that most people don't have money issues.
They have behavior issues that cause money symptoms.
And when we understand that, we start to realize that, oh, wait a second. If my money is a symptom of.
My behaviors and my behaviors are there.
Well, the behaviors are a result of my thinking, and my thinking is adjusted because of my attitude, how I approach it, or as I call them, bias. It's the way we process, it's the way we interpret, it's the way we see things through our eyes, through our.
Experience, and through the things.
In fact, if you look at the definition of it, that's exactly what they say it is. They literally say it is an error. It is an error in thinking when processing or interpreting information.
An error in thinking when processing or interpreting information. And think about this.
When it comes to money, often our money stuff is learned through observation. We don't talk about it, we don't teach it, we don't do anything. Unless you're part of this group and you're part of this journey with me where we're talking about it, we're having.
The conversations, we're teaching, we're giving you.
Skills, we're giving you stuff that allow you to process things more effectively.
Most of us have grown up learning about money through observation. So we observe, we interpret, and then we decide. But sometimes our interpretations are incorrect. And there's what I would say, eight primary biases that can actually destroy us, that literally rob us blind from our financial wealth. And I think that when we start to understand how they impact us, we.
What you can do about them, you.
Can then navigate more appropriately and make cleaner, clearer decisions without the biases that.
Can make you make bad decisions, that.
Can help you.
Assist you in making bad decisions, if you will. And so I want to walk through some of these biases to give you an idea of what it may take to work through this. And at the end, I'm going to give you some things to correct the.
Biases, things to do, things to have.
Because here's what I know. If we can manage the biases, if we can get clarity on the biases and say, oh, I get it, all right, I'm going to push that aside. And we can think differently about our money, we will think.
Differently about our.
Wealth, which means that we will act differently. When we act differently, we create a habit of behavior, a system of behavior that get us different results.
And so that's the thing that I want us to start to look at. And so what ends up happening is that we start to interpret something that happens and carrying it to a different place where we give it a lot more credence, a lot more credit and a lot more weight than it deserves. And then we start to make bad financial decisions.
I'll give you an example.
And so the first bias is what we call, what I call the infallibility.
Bias, okay, the infallibility bias.
This is really about confidence.
This comes into play, this comes into play when someone, when someone turns around.
And they actually get a quick win.
I actually think I remember, I remember this. So my son, the first time he.
Went to Las Vegas, he said, I'm going to play craps. My buddy's going to show me how to play craps.
Now inside, I'm going good. All right, all right. Be careful because you can lose a lot. My hope was that he lost a.
Little bit.
So.
He would get a lesson.
Because the mistake that happens is too.
Often when we win, we get confident.
We think we're infallible, we think, I got this. I can't tell you how often I.
See this in the stock market.
Listen, for 1112 years to 2020, we had nothing but up. And, and people would come to me and go, I've been killing it in the stock market. I've been killing it in the stock market. Everything's going up. Everything I touch turns to gold. I've got the Midas touch. Do you have the Midas touch or is it just the fact that the market is on a terror, it's going up like crazy and has been doing it for years?
Well, guess what?
They thought they were infallible. They're the same people that jumped into things without a thought, without the analysis, without the logic, without the processes, without the systems that we teach or that we talk about. And they literally thought, I can't go wrong, I have the Midas touch.
And guess what? When the market corrected, when the market went to bear territory, when the market is being as volatile as it is now, they get hurt.
See, the infallibility bias is something where.
We become way overconfident. We are blinded by the prior successes and so we continue to do things flippantly as if we can't do any wrong.
So the key here is this. When you have the infallibility bias, if.
You feel that tendency of I can't do anything wrong, can't do anything wrong.
The important thing then is to sit.
Back and say, wait a second.
I need to challenge my assumptions here.
I need to know that I work a plan.
See, when we work with, when I work with my elites clients, my one on one clients, or my master's client, my small group, when I work with them, the primary thing is to, is to one, create a plan.
To create a plan so we have.
A place to operate from.
We don't go into an investment without understanding what the plan is for the investment to get in, to get out, how it fits into the overall financial plan, to create a path to financial freedom. And then we start to challenge the assumptions.
Is this the right investment?
Am I thinking about it correctly? What happens if the market turns on me? How do I get out? What do I do? Okay, it's what I call stress testing the plan.
Okay.
But too often we don't plan. We think that we're going to win because I won before. I can't do any wrong.
So we don't do the due diligence, we don't do the work, we don't.
Evaluate the investment the way we did in the past.
And then we get hurt.
So with the infallibility bias, the thing.
That you want to do is make sure that you have one, a plan in place and two, you challenge the assumptions of the plan. Okay, that leads me to bias number two.
Oh my gosh, this, ah, I fell prey to this a lot. Okay, Sunk cost bias. The sunk cost bias.
Let me move that.
This is a bias where we've invested money into some and because we've invested money into something, we've actually, we won't let go of it. We, It's I put money in and I'm going to keep putting money in because I made that decision before and in order for that decision to be right, I got to keep funding it.
I did this in the Ponzi scheme.
But we need to look at things.
Through a new set of eyes.
You might have felt this at times. Where, where? Well, I can't get out because I.
Already put money in.
There are people right now that have bought into stocks and the stock dropped.
20, 30, 40, 50%.
And they stay in it because of how much they invested previously. Think about this, think about it. In the crypto space, Bitcoin at one point was almost 70,000 a coin.
It's down at 20.
Those people that bought at $60,000 and.
Sitting on it in 20, they are sitting back and a lot of them are holding on going, I put 60.
In, I'm just not going to get out. Here's the question you got to ask here.
And this is something that I got caught in also. But ask yourself, remember, the overall objective is to build financial freedom, to build a money machine that's going to take care of us, to build a portfolio that's going to generate the income and the cash flow to support us. And so we got to ask the question. We made an investment based on hopefully a plan, hopefully a stress tested plan. We challenged the assumptions because of the infallibility bias. We've done all that stuff. We look at it and now we say we with a clean mind. Yes, I invested $10,000, $1,000, $100,000, whatever it is, with a clear mind and a clean slate. Not because we put money in. But ask the question, how does holding onto this or adding to it.
Make.
This a better investment for me?
I added to the Ponzi scheme. How was adding to a Ponzi scheme going to make it better for me? It didn't.
That's the short answer.
It didn't.
So we may have made a bad choice of an investment. And if we did, and things don't turn out right, you get out and you move on. You make a new choice. We don't stay in it because the.
Sunk cost in it, the tendency is to do that. Oh, my God, well, if I don't sell, I won't take the loss.
But.
The loss is there. And if the stock isn't coming back or the fundamentals have changed, or the investment has changed, it's time to get out, lick the wounds and move on.
This is why the plan is important. I did a video just recently about the whole whole thing of, before you enter an investment, you have to know the exit of the investment.
Because if we don't know what the.
Trigger is to exit the investment, we will tend to stay in it longer than we should. We'll change the rules when we shouldn't. We'll adjust our perspective to fit what we want to make happen. Okay, which leads me to another bias.
So in this, the sunk cost bias, you want to ask the question, how does holding on to this or adding to the position going to make this a better investment?
The answer is, I don't know. Then maybe we should be rethinking.
Okay, bias number three. Bias number three.
You probably heard this term before.
Confirmation bias.
Oh, my gosh.
This is when we start to look for things to prove our point without looking at things that are disproving our point. We want things that are going to confirm our position.
More so than those that might challenge the position.
One of the things that happens, one of the.
Most powerful forces in human nature is to stay consistent and congruent with prior decisions.
And so if we made a past.
Decision to make an investment.
And we attach ourselves to that decision, the tendency.
Is to look for all the evidence.
That confirms that we made the right.
Decision in the first place and exclude.
The evidence that might say, oh, we might want to rethink that.
That. That probably wasn't a good decision. Listen, I've made plenty of bad decisions. I've lost lots of money in investments. I've continued on, and I've done enough to be successful. But the fact of the matter is, is that unless you're willing to take. Take the position and say, look.
Made.
A decision, I'm not just going to look at the evidence that supports that decision.
I'm going to look at the evidence that challenges the decision and be open to it.
You're going to use this confirmation bias.
To just keep supporting a bad decision potentially.
And so you want to be aware of this. And the way to do this again.
Is if you have a plan, but.
Also, also to look at it through.
Two other ways is one, to have an advisor, a counselor, a coach, a.
Mentor, someone like me that will challenge the decision before it's made, challenge decision after it's made, and really start to test the assumptions to be able to look at and say, well, what if it did this? And then I want you to ask yourself and say, am I open to.
New perspectives on this?
Because if we're not, we'll tend to lean towards the confirmation bias and only.
Look at what we want to look at because it proves what we want and not the stuff that might disprove.
Where we're at.
So here's the question I ask some of my clients. Do I say, well, I want you to ask the question or answer the question. What would happen if my assumptions around this choice, this bias, we're 100% wrong? Then what? What would you do? What would the decision be? And what's the possibility that we are wrong?
When we understand the downside and we.
Test those assumptions through that, we tend to push back on the confirmation bias. But if all we look for are.
The things that prove our point and not the things that challenge our point.
Then we will see it through jaded eyes.
Okay, that's confirmation bias. The next one, number four.
Number four is loss aversion bias.
All right, so here's the thing. Loss aversion. The interesting thing is that we will.
Do more to avoid a loss than to capture a gain.
The tendency is to make sure that we're not willing to. I don't want to take a loss. I want to take a loss. I don't want to take a loss. And what ends up happening is actually.
We don't take a. We don't make a decision because we're afraid of the loss more than we are afraid of the game.
We're not looking at the possibility of Gains.
Here's the thing.
When you go into investing, no matter any investment, I don't care how risky or risk free, they tell you there is always a balancing point. There's always a balance of here's the return, in other words, what you can make. Here's the risk of making it or not making it. And you have to weigh those. The higher the return, typically the higher the risk. If you want to double your money in a day, you're going to take on a lot of risk. It doesn't come without the other. And if someone's promising you that run.
I watched a popular podcaster.
Host ask someone, what would you advise someone if they said they had $10,000 and they wanted to make it a hundred thousand dollars in a year, 10x it. Now, wait a second.
How many investments are you going to.
Find.
That can 10x an investment.
In.
A year's time and not be risky?
It was a ridiculous question.
In the sense of, look, you never look at I gotta make money without taking into consideration the risk side of making that money. Because there are plenty of ways that you can make money. You can go and bet everything at the roulette table and roll and spin the wheel and you could make a killing, but you could lose it all. You got to look at it through risk and reward. It's called the risk and reward paradox. And one of the things that we do and the things that I would look at is take a piece of.
Paper.
Take a piece of paper and.
Split it in half.
And on one side, make sure you list out all of the things that are good and that could be good at us, the roar side of it. On the other side, I want you to list out all the things that.
Are risky and could go wrong with it.
Because until we look at both sides of it and say, okay, this is what could happen, but the potential cost of it is this, we tend to lean towards the risk side and be afraid of risk more than we are going and saying, is it worth the risk to take to make this? Every investment is why we do risk tolerance, risk capacity, and all of those analysis for people. Because every client, even my elite members and my master's members, we will spend the time to understand what your risk level is, your capacity to take on risk, your tolerance to facilitate the risk, all of those things. Because you can't make an investing decision without looking at the risk profile to make it happen. I did a whole episode on that. We'll hook it up in the show notes here. But point being is that There is always a risk, reward, trade off.
If I want higher returns, if I.
Want to make more money faster, I'm.
Probably going to take on more risk.
Which means.
That I have the chance to lose more. In other words, if I'm going to invest 10, that would I invest $10,000.
To make $11,000. My 10,000 plus 1,000. 10% if there was a chance I could lose the whole 10,000.
Okay, reward 1,000, risk 10,000.
That's the weighing you need to do.
But loss aversion puts a lot of weight on the loss side, and we.
Don'T look at the return side.
That leads me to the next bias.
This one's an interesting one, and this is endowment bias.
And this is really an interesting one.
When you start to understand what it is when you own something, this is.
The endowment, the ownership of it, where you turn around and say, look, I didn't really value it, but now that it's mine, I value it more.
That's the endowment bias. Okay?
They did a study. It was really interesting. They did a study where they gave, like, a coffee mug and something else to two different people, and they let them sit with the coffee mug. I don't remember what the other thing was, but two different things to let.
Them sit with it for a day.
And then at the end of the day, they said, do you want to swap? And the people, literally everyone in the room, said, no, no, no, this is.
Mine, this is mine.
When they started the day, it wasn't theirs. When they started the day, they didn't have it. When they started the day, it wasn't on their desk. But now, because they had it for a little bit, they took ownership, they raised the value.
And they don't want to give it up.
The endowment bias.
Here's the question, because here's what happens. You get into an investment and now you own it, and you raise the stakes in your ownership in a way that you say, oh, no, no, no.
No, no, no, no, this is mine, this is mine.
I'm not going to give it up.
So the question you got to ask is, if I didn't own this investment now.
Would I invest in it today?
Or is it my.
The sheer fact that I own it and I don't want to give it up. I went through this with Facebook.
I got into Facebook way early, before the IPO at $17.
Facebook, as you know, ran up close to $400 now. I had a bunch of shares.
I'm going, this is great.
I wouldn't let go. I wouldn't let go. And then Facebook, earlier in the year, missed earnings and dropped 100 bucks a share.
100 bucks a share?
Oh.
Sunk cost bias, confirmation bias, endowment bias. All of them were playing havoc with me. But I had to look at it and say, if I didn't own the investment now, would I invest in it with what it's doing? And I said, no. So what did I do? I sold all my Facebook stock.
Okay?
It was a hundred dollars down from where it could have sold it, but I was way up from where I.
Was at since I sold it. Since I sold it, that stock has dropped another $200 a share. $200 a share.
Had I held onto it with endowment.
Bias, confirmation bias, and all of that stuff, sunk cost, I'd have rode that train all the way down and lost another $200 a share.
And so instead, I made a bunch of money on Facebook. And I don't own any Facebook stock, but I don't have any attachment to it anymore either, okay? But when that attachment gets too great, we start to adjust our thinking and we start to not think about it rationally. And it actually took a coach to.
Say, let's talk about this. This.
Would you invest in this? What's the story? Do you like the story? Do you like the. The path? Do you like this? And I go, no. See? Then seems like your decision's made. And I was right, Sold it. And I watched it just tank from there.
All right, that leads me to the next bias. The next bias, number six, is recency bias. And this one people are struggling with right now, okay? And this is when we give inordinate amount of weight to recent occurrences, okay? In other words, they're looking at saying, the market is so volatile, I don't want to invest in the stock market. Even think about depression babies, okay? How they respond. The things that recently happened have a greater impact in our life and our.
Choices and our decisions, especially when we.
Start to extrapolate them to the future as if they're permanent. Look, the market goes up 8 out of 10 years, up out of 8 out of 10 years. But we might be in this downtime that all of a sudden the market's down. It's in bear territory. And now we've had some really good, good weeks, okay? But who knows? And it goes down. So what we remember, the recent memory is the volatility, the slide, the hurt, the pain that. I'm looking at my account, it's down 20%. It's 30%, 40% down, whatever it is or you were in bitcoin and it went from 60,000 to 20,000. You say, this is the new reality.
The reality in the stock market, the reality in real estate is they go up and down. In the long term, the market goes up. In the short term, it's a roller coaster ride. But too often we allow the recent events to take hold and give them more weight into the future than what we should. And the way to counteract this recency bias is to always work from a long term plan. Goes back to having a plan. This is why you need a mentor, a coach or an advisor that's going to help you facilitate creating a financial plan to your financial freedom to build into it. This is one of the things we do with the elite members where we, we build the plan and then you stress test the plan. And now when all of a sudden the emotions of that recency bias come in, we go, hold on, let's pull the plan out. What does the plan say? Are we starting to make decisions contrary to the plan and is that supported.
When the market tanks? 1100 points or whatever? You know, I talk to my wealth team and we talk through it. We said, let's look at the plan. I'm not saying that I'm exempt from the emotions. I get the motions just like you and I. Oh God.
Did we make a wrong decision? Nope.
Here's the plan. We stress tested it. We know what it's going to do, we've got it in place. So you got to work from a long term view and a long term plan and not allow the shorter term. Recent events dictate what might be happening long term. We know the market goes down in the short term, but we also know that it corrects and continues up. You just gotta look at any long term chart.
Ten years or more, market goes up.
Even real estate, it may be slower, but a lot of real estate long term goes up. Okay, so recency bias becomes an issue. We need to look at it, but.
That'S the reason that we have a plan.
Next Bias seven is framing bias. Oh my gosh. This is something that I see happen.
With people that are trying to trade stocks.
What happens is that they decide I'm going to buy a stock because, or.
I'm going to short a stock or I'm going to long a stock or.
An option and they decide that they're going to get into an investment because.
They expect it to go down or.
They expect it to go up. So what ends up happening? I'll, I'll kind of draw this Out. So, so they get into a stock they buy here and instead of this, they expect the stock to go up. But instead of the stock going up, it starts to go down. Now, remember I said earlier that you always know what your exit is before you make the investment. Well, if it was someone working with me, they would have had something called a stop loss or we would have known if it goes down to here, we're out. But what ends up happening is that most people don't have a plan. Most people don't have the exit drawn out. And so when the stock or the investment goes the wrong way, instead of them getting out when they should have, they say, well, instead of this going to be. I originally thought this was going to be 30 days held. Well, now I'm just going to make it a long term. So I'm going to hold it for six months. So what they did is they reframed the time frame to fit a narrative that they're trying to tell, well, this will come back.
So I'm going to now hold it longer.
But when you went into the investment.
The intent was 30 days. When you went into the investment, the intent was it for it to go up and you'd get out. When you went into the investment, you said if it was going to go down and if it hit this point, you get out.
But now you're going to ignore that.
And you're going to say, instead of.
Being in it for 30 days, I'm.
Going to be in it for six months. But what happens if at six months it's not where you want it?
Then you turn around and reframe it again.
You go to 12 months.
See, what ends up happening with the framing bias is you start to change.
The rules to fit a narrative to.
Get potentially an outcome that you want. This is a little bit of the confirmation bias coming in. This is a little bit of the loss aversion bias coming in. This is a little bit of the.
Sunk cost bias coming in.
But when we constantly change the rules.
Or reframe the rules, reframe the timeframe.
Because it didn't do what we wanted.
It to do, that's when we start making bad decisions and bad choices. Leads me to the last bias. And then I'm going to walk through some things to watch out for the last bias.
And this one you got to be really careful about.
Is what I call the bandwagon bias.
Oh my gosh, this one's crazy. Because this, you can call it, you can call it hurting or the meme or Anything like that. This is why GameStop did what it did. The reason that GameStop ran up to 400 bucks a share was because everyone jumped on the bandwagon. There was no economic reason for it. There's no reason for that stock to be at that price. There's no reason for any of it. But what happened was it was a meme. People were talking it up and people said, I don't want to miss it. I don't want to miss it. You jumped on the bandwagon. They wrote it up. There was a lot of people that made a lot of money on the way up to 400 bucks.
There's a whole lot of people that lost a lot of money on the way down from $400 because they got on the bandwagon late.
So we need to be aware that when the emotional pulls of fomo, when the emotional pulls of, oh, everyone's getting in. I've talked to three people. They made a whole lot of money doing this. I need to get in.
That should be your alarm. That should sound the alarm for you to say, whoa, wait a second, am I jumping on the bandwagon here? Because that's how you're going to get hurt. Meme stocks hurting, bandwagon, however you want to call it.
When we start to move in concert with everyone else and put logical, analytical thought out the window, that's when we get hurt. So the way to counteract this bandwagon bias is to make sure that you have sound analysis.
That you have investing rules. I give people investing rules. We say do not. You don't do these things.
And you follow the rules. When I didn't follow the rules, I got hurt. It's how I got in the Ponzi. It's how I lost that money. It's how I got in trouble because I ignored my rules. Nope. We set the rules before we start.
We follow the rules throughout the game. If some people make a billion dollars on the bandwagon, good for them, because there's some people that lost a billion.
So I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon with anyone unless the analysis, the testing, the plan and the rules make sense. All right, hopefully that makes sense.
So those are the eight biases that I think really rob you. What do you do then? What do you do in making sure that you keep these biases, these attitudes.
If you will, at at bay? And I think that there's six things you can do. The first is this.
Manage your emotions.
Biases, by and large, come from an.
Emotional Response, an emotional interpretation to something that has happened. And when we make emotional choices with our finances, typically they're not good choices. So the way to do this, one of the things to do this is to make sure that you have a.
Coach, a mentor, someone that is a sounding board that you can talk to, that you can go to when you feel the tugs of emotion coming into.
Play with your financial choices and your financial decisions. Okay? The second thing that you can do. So manage emotions. Second thing that you do is seek.
Out contrary opinions, intentionally challenge your thoughts. It's the reason that you have coaches, it's the reason you have mentors, it's the reason you have advisors. It's the reason we build a community. So we can challenge the assumptions and we can look at the contrary thoughts to make sure that we're thinking through all of it.
Okay?
Number three, avoid developing unhealthy attachments to a particular investment. Like I did with Facebook.
Great companies.
Are not always great investments, and vice versa.
Great investments may not be great companies. And too often, if we get an unhealthy attachment to an investment, to a company, to an investment in self, we hold on longer than we should, we give more than we should have, and we lose a lot more than we should.
Okay?
So we avoid developing unhealthy attachments.
Again, plan test rules.
Number three.
Don't chase yesterday's winners. Okay.
Don't chase yesterday's winners.
Here's the thing.
If you hear any investment advisor, they will typically say, past performance is not an indication of future results. We still look at past performance. But if we look at a company, say, that was such a good company, so I got to invest because they did so well, I'll give you a company.
Okay, I was a great company. Polaroid. Some of you are probably too young to know, but Polaroid was a phenomenal company.
But just because it was a great company in the past, is it a good company to invest in today?
I don't think so.
Because what we're investing in is someone's future, not someone's past. The past might give us an indication. The past might give us a story, but it isn't telling us about the future if we don't look at the future. So every investment is about looking forward and saying, what will it do for me in the future? Not what did it do in the past. And it may have been the greatest company in the past.
If it's not a good company today.
Then we don't chase yesterday's winners.
Next one number.
Number five.
Be Cautious when following crowd.
If you're listening to media, if you're following social media, look, there's a whole lot of people out there touting, oh, no, down real estate and all kinds of stuff.
Be careful of that. Look for their bias.
How do they make the money? When you start to follow the crowd, you start to risk getting on the.
Bandwagon and not making an informed decision.
There's plenty of people that try to.
Get me into investments. And I go, here's my list of rules, here's my due diligence list, here's my analysis, here's my plan. If it doesn't fit the rules, if.
It doesn't pass muster with a due.
Diligence, if it doesn't fit the plan, it doesn't become an investment for me. And if someone else makes millions of dollars on it, good for them. But you stick to the plan, you stick to the rules, because by and large, you will lose less, win more that way.
All right, and last thing that I.
Think you need to look at is to focus more on detailed analysis versus stories.
There are a lot of people out there that can tell a great story.
About an investment, but that's story. What does the data show? What does the analysis show? Is it. If you test the assumptions, does it still make sense?
The stories are great stories. You know, pull out emotions, but emotions in financial decisions are not good. So I'll take the stories, I want.
To hear a good story.
But then give me the data, give me the numbers. Prove to me that this makes sense for me to put money into it and invest into it and that I'm going to make not only my money back, but a return on my money in the future. Return of capital and return on capital. If that's not the case, then yeah, I don't care how good the story is.
There's plenty of people that come on.
Shark Tank and they have a great story and it's a wonderful story. And people love the story and the sharks love the story. But the sharks make the decision not on the story, they make it on the numbers, they make it on the possibility, they make it on the risk versus return and they do a quick detailed analysis on it before they make a choice. They don't make a choice on the story, and the same thing goes for you.
So those are the things I would do. Manage your emotions, look for contrary opinions. Get a coach, get a mentor, get.
An advisor that you can use as a sounding board.
Don't develop, let's say, unhealthy attachments.
To specific investments. Don't chase yesterday's winners.
Be cautious of following the crowd and.
Use detailed analysis with some rules in place that.
Will change your money attitudes and keep you safe on the journey to financial freedom.
I hope that this helps. I hope that you got a chance.
To see some of this in a.
Way where you go, ooh, maybe I.
Do some of that. Because you know what?
I'm not exempt. I think I've had all of these in my life and I still will see them creep up.
But I have a way to remedy them, I have a way to counteract them, I have a way to move through them so I don't allow the.
Emotions of the bias to.
Create bad interpretations of things that I'm going through.
And make bad decisions that can hurt me financially. And that's what I want for you.
So be aware of these. I hope that this helps and I.
Look forward to seeing an upcoming episode of the Affluent Entrepreneur Show. And until then, always, always strive to live a life that outlives you. Cheers.
Thank you for listening to the Affluent Entrepreneurs with me, your host, Mel Abraham. If you want to achieve financial liberation to create an affluent lifestyle, join me in the Affluent Entrepreneur Facebook group now by going to melabraham.com group and I'll see you there.
And that's it for this episode of Building your Money Machine, where we help you learn how to master your money, eliminate financial stress, and live a life of choice. If you found this valuable or helpful to you, here's what I'd love for you to do. If you do me a favor, go to Apple, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate and review the show. It helps us tremendously to keep us at the top of the list so we can continue to get this information and this message out to people. Because I truly believe that financial freedom is your birthright and I want to help each and every one of you claim it. Thanks so much.










