“I can’t afford to retire.”
“I need to pay less tax.”
“It’ll never happen to me.”
People say these things with real conviction. They plan their whole lives around them. And when you ask what they’re actually based on, the honest answer is usually: nothing much. A feeling. Something a colleague said. The way the last few years have gone.
Hunches, in other words. Dressed up as facts because we’ve repeated them to ourselves for long enough.
The trouble is you then act on them. You don’t retire when you could. You chase a tax saving that makes you worse off. You skip the protection because misfortune is something that happens to other people, right up until it isn’t.
Most of what we do here is gently separating the two. Here’s what you believe. Here’s what’s actually true. They’re often a long way apart, and the gap is where the interesting decisions live.
You’d be surprised how much changes when you stop steering by hunch.