Understanding Investor Personalities – Part 1

Our 2 Cents – Episode #131

Understanding Investor Personalities – Part 1

Have you ever noticed certain personality traits in yourself when it comes to your financial matters? In Part 1 of a 2-part series, Steve and Gabriel explore the world of investor personality types and how, as advisors, they’ve learned to work with and help all kinds of investors.

1. Understanding Investor Personalities:
   • The Burned One: When trusting just doesn’t come very easily to you anymore.
   • The Do-It-Yourselfer: When you’ve got it all handled by yourself and don’t need any outside help.
   • The Price Shopper: When finding the best deal at the lowest possible price out there is your top priority.
   • The Over-Analyzer: When “analysis paralysis” tends to take over control of your decision making.
   • The Ostrich: When you catch a case of “hope-itis” and cross your fingers that it will all just work out.

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Podcast Transcript

Announcer: You’re listening to Our 2 Cents with the team from SGL Financial, building wealth for life. Steve Lewit is the president of SGL Financial and Gabriel Lewit is the CEO. They’re here to discuss all the latest in financial news, trends, strategies, and more.

Gabriel Lewit: Hey, good morning, guys and gals, and women and men, everybody of all ages.

Steve Lewit: Children and pets.

Gabriel Lewit: Well, I don’t think children are listening to the show. Most likely not.

Steve Lewit: Nor are the pets, but what the heck.

Gabriel Lewit: Pets might be listening in if you have this on the speaker.

Steve Lewit: We might be all inclusive. We might be.

Gabriel Lewit: Well, welcome to Our 2 Cents. You’ve got Gabriel Lewit and Steven Lewit here with you this morning or whenever you’re watching the show, and we’re excited to talk to you. We’ve got, of course, a terrific show lined up for you today, if I must say so myself.

Steve Lewit: We do, Gabriel, but I have bad news for you.

Gabriel Lewit: What’s that?

Steve Lewit: They are not watching the show. They are listening to show.

Gabriel Lewit: Did I say watching?

Steve Lewit: Yes, you did.

Gabriel Lewit: Didn’t you know we’re filming this?

Steve Lewit: Oh, well, okay.

Gabriel Lewit: You didn’t?

Steve Lewit: I better put my shorts on or something.

Gabriel Lewit: To be fair, maybe they’re playing the MP3 through their TV.

Steve Lewit: No, they’re not watching this show. You cannot win this argument.

Gabriel Lewit: They could be watching the podcast on the TV screen.

Steve Lewit: You cannot talk your way out of this error of speech. They are not watching the show.

Gabriel Lewit: This is what happens when I only have one cup of coffee before the show instead of two.

Steve Lewit: I got it.

Gabriel Lewit: All right. Well, hope you’re doing well. Today, we’re going to talk about investment personalities.

Steve Lewit: This is pretty interesting.

Gabriel Lewit: People personalities, if you will.

Steve Lewit: This is fun.

Gabriel Lewit: Well, we have quite a few of them, and what we’re going to also talk a little bit about is what these personalities look like so you can self-assess if you happen to be one of them.

Steve Lewit: Or if you even want to.

Gabriel Lewit: Or maybe you’re more than one of these personalities also, which is a combo hybrid personality, if you will. Then we’ll also talk a little bit about some of the ways that we could maybe help work with you, depending on your personality style.

Steve Lewit: I think the point is, as a financial advisor, how do you work with people that have different personalities? And no personality is right or wrong.

Gabriel Lewit: Everybody is different.

Steve Lewit: You have to cater, I don’t want to say cater, respect the personality that’s sitting in front of you. Otherwise, there’s no relationship.

Gabriel Lewit: Yeah, of course. Good point. There’s different ways that we as advisors work with people of different types and personalities, and we’ll share a little bit of that here with you also. Then we’ve got a couple listener questions, so make sure you stay tuned for those. We’ve got a few good ones. One question that seems to be on everybody’s mind this year, which I won’t spoil, you’ve got to wait for it. I got to tease you with a little cliffhanger there.

Steve Lewit: Yeah, I’m teased. I didn’t look it up. I don’t know.

Gabriel Lewit: See, now you want to know too.

Steve Lewit: No, I want to know too.

Gabriel Lewit: All right, so let’s go ahead and dive in. As you mentioned, different personalities. We’re going to talk about a handful of these, and I’m going to start with the first one. The first one is someone that’s been… Well, that’s been burned before, let’s put it that way, meaning that they’ve worked with some advisor in some capacity at some point in their past and they didn’t have a good experience or the experience that they were hoping for.

Steve Lewit: I think a harsher way of putting it is that they feel victimized.

Gabriel Lewit: Yeah, it’s a little harsher way of saying it, but they listen to advice, and they hear advice, and they want advice, but oftentimes they don’t trust it given the bad experience that they have had in the past.

Steve Lewit: Or they were promised things in the past, “We’re going to take care of you. We’re going to call you. We’re going to do tax planning. We’re going to do all of these things,” and nothing happens.

Gabriel Lewit: Most of the time it could fall into a couple of categories if this is at all resonating for you. Maybe you had an advisor that promised you the moon and then didn’t deliver on those promises. Maybe they promised you a specific investment performance, and then that investment maybe did the opposite and maybe it lost half its value or surprise you with how risky it was when you thought it was supposed to be conservative. You might have, of course, as you mentioned, dad, just never heard from this person ever again after you bought something from them, thinking that they were going to be there for you and then they weren’t. These are the types of situations that often lead into this feeling.

Steve Lewit: Or alternatively, let’s say you go with a new advisor and then you get caught in a market crash and that advisor doesn’t communicate or you feel like it’s his or her fault. That would be feeling victimized by this.

Gabriel Lewit: What do we do as advisors? Well, first of all, when we’re talking with you and you start to share some of this, we often ask you how have your experience has been with advisors in the past, or have you worked with an advisor in the past? This will often come up if you start to share this with us. Now, the biggest challenge here is us not sounding like the prior advisor.

Steve Lewit: Yes, that’s true. We’re going to do all those things too.

Gabriel Lewit: Because when there’s a trust issue, if we as advisors say, “Well, look, I’m really sorry to hear that. There’s some bad apples out there, of course, which there are, but we don’t do that. We talk to our clients, and we communicate and we give you a plan. Our investments are reliable and steady,” and what goes through this person’s mind is, “Oh yeah, well, that’s just what the last guy said.”

Steve Lewit: That sounds familiar.

Gabriel Lewit: That’s what’s hard about working together here. Dad, what do you think? I mean, not to spend too much time just on this one personality here, but what do you suggest that if you recognize this in yourself that you have a tough time trusting new advisors, how do you work through that as a investor?

Steve Lewit: What I try and do, and I know you do too to, Gabriel, is we try to get the issue out on the table. First of all, let’s talk honestly with each other. And that’s when we ask people, what’s been your experience with other advisors? We really appreciate it if people say, “Well, I’m not happy, I’ve been burned,” so now it’s out on the table. In my office, I have an elephant.

Gabriel Lewit: Not a real one.

Steve Lewit: Not a real one. I always point to the elephant, and I say, “Look, I understand.” I think just really understanding that when people come to us, they don’t know who to trust. If they’ve been burned before, they especially don’t know who to trust. I think just getting it out on the table, talking about it and taking things slowly is very, very important. The other thing, if I have a victim personality, and again, that’s not a bad thing, it’s just who you are, I want to know that I’m with someone that’s not putting pressure on me to make a decision. That’s very, very important. Because as soon as I feel pressure, I’m going to run the other way, even though this might be a great advisor.

Gabriel Lewit: Well, I think if you’re out there and you feel like this could be you, then you’ve got to at some point take that leap and trust somebody else again. Otherwise, you risk just perpetually saying, “Nah, I can’t do it,” and you just end up doing everything on your own, which has its own risk, which we’re going to get to here actually in a second. Actually, maybe I’ll skip orders. I was going to talk about this in just a second, but I’ll talk about it now because that segued into it.

Steve Lewit: Which is the other side, one is the North Pole, and one is the South Pole.

Gabriel Lewit: Well, no, they’re a little different. The point is the other personality type here I was going to mention, which segue ways here, is a do-it-yourselfer.

Steve Lewit: Total trust in themselves.

Gabriel Lewit: There’s a variety of reasons why you might have done things yourself or continue to do things yourself, but the do-it-yourselfer believes that they can do everything that an advisor can do on their own without needing to pay for the advisor’s help.

Steve Lewit: Or they can’t trust the advisor.

Gabriel Lewit: Maybe there’s a willing do-it-yourselfer and an unwilling do-it-yourselfer perhaps, but what I’m referencing here in this example, this next personality type, is the willing DIYer.

Steve Lewit: I know as much as the advisor, and I don’t need to pay for advice.

Gabriel Lewit: Right. In other words, every time that you think you need something, you go to Google. You maybe go to a free workshop. You go to a variety of different sources out there. You listen to podcasts like this, and your takeaway at the end of all those is, oh yeah, I could do that. You know what’s interesting? Because I consider myself to have a very high level of self-confidence.

Steve Lewit: You do?

Gabriel Lewit: I do.

Steve Lewit: I mean you do.

Gabriel Lewit: In many things that I do.

Steve Lewit: That was an affirmation, not a question. I meant to say you do. You do.

Gabriel Lewit: You do.

Steve Lewit: You do.

Gabriel Lewit: I do.

Steve Lewit: You do.

Gabriel Lewit: Okay, but you have to be careful. There’s a slippery slope there, right? When you take that too far and you start thinking that you can do anything that anybody else can do regardless of experience, you’ve got to know where there’s a boundary there as a do-it-yourselfer for when you should probably seek professional help in a certain area. The tricky part here is when you’re in accumulation mode, and if you have a general interest in financial investing and financial planning, if you will, it’s not too hard to create your own portfolio in preparation of just saving and accumulating for retirement.

Steve Lewit: Anybody can do that. You just stick your money in the market and hope it grows.

Gabriel Lewit: It’s my example of if you are an airplane pilot, maybe taxiing the runway is not… Let’s assume there’s no other planes on the runway for a second. But just pushing the gas pedal and driving it slowly down the runway probably isn’t the most challenging part. Okay?

Steve Lewit: Yes. Where are you going with this?

Gabriel Lewit: Then you get to take off.

Steve Lewit: I’m with you, buddy.

Gabriel Lewit: Take-off and landing. All of a sudden, the complexity multiplies. Are you with me?

Steve Lewit: I’ve been with you from the beginning.

Gabriel Lewit: I’m not sure you are, but that’s okay. I’m going to keep going until I make my point here. The point is, when you are in accumulation mode, that’s like taxiing the runway, generally fairly simple. But then you’ve got to get to take off, flying midair, or landing, which is, generally speaking, much more complicated and much more dangerous because there’s a lot more at risk.

Steve Lewit: You can get into a storm, into a rain, into a wind funnel. There’s a lot going on.

Gabriel Lewit: You’re taxiing the runway. It starts to storm. You just don’t take off the plane. This is when you turn into accumulation mode, into retirement distribution mode. The complexity in financial planning and investing more than doubles, more than quadruples. It probably increases eightfold.

Steve Lewit: But you see, Gabriel, the folks that are confident do-it-yourselfers don’t see that. They say, “Well, I’ve done it for 20 years. It’ll a little different. I’ll keep doing it.” I think I really do appreciate your point, even though it took quite a while to get there.

Gabriel Lewit: Hey! You have to set up the analogy and explain it.

Steve Lewit: Yes, you do. You did a good job. You did good.

Gabriel Lewit: Well, thank you.

Steve Lewit: Oh, you’re welcome. Now I forgot the point that I was going to make here. Oh, here’s the point. What I was thinking while you were talking is that it’s not what you know that hurts you, it’s what you don’t know that hurts you. I think the people that I’ve met that are do-it-yourselfers have very confident egos.

Gabriel Lewit: Absolutely they do.

Steve Lewit: They think they know. I’m looking at them and saying, “There’s another side to that story that you’re not addressing.” They don’t want to see that.

Gabriel Lewit: Well, it’s very similar to if you’re a smart individual, if you’re confident in yourself, you’ve made good decisions, you can generally do a lot of things yourself, you can get into this mindset that, “I could figure out anything,” including your financial planning and investing and retirement planning. But those same people, if you’ve never done anything before, let’s say fixing your house, and I would be one of those people, I could go online. I could buy books. I could talk to the Home Depot guy. I could go to a workshop, and I could watch Google videos. I could do all these things, and I’m going to get to a cursory level where I say, “You know what? I think I could renovate my bathroom.”

Steve Lewit: Well, you probably could.

Gabriel Lewit: And then midway through that, when some random pipe bursts and water’s flooding through the house or whatever the heck else is going to happen, that’s when not having experience is going to be a big challenge for me trying to fix my bathroom.

Steve Lewit: Well, put it another way, I tell the story, if I may, often is I played professional tennis. I would go to the clubs, and I would play the top club player, the number one club player, who is really, really good, but they could never beat me. Because if they hit a thousand tennis balls a week, I hit 10,000 a week. It’s just a matter of experience and expertise in seeing all the angles. Like you said, if the pipe bursts, what do I do now? But an experienced person knows what to do.

Gabriel Lewit: This is the last example I’ll give on this. I just had a friend over this last weekend and somehow, we were talking about home renovations and stuff like that. He was like, “Yeah, the other year I tried to update my basement and I renovate the flooring or something like that. I forgot to put in some water prevention this, that, or the other lining.” I don’t know what it is, because I don’t know anything about home improvement.

Steve Lewit: It’s the dampness.

Gabriel Lewit: And then he was like, “And then my friend was getting it done professionally, and I was watching them as they were doing it, their neighbor, and I saw that they had put down this liner thing. I asked my friend, I’m like, ‘What was that?’ They’re like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s to prevent the water from…'” Oops, I forgot that. Just examples of, to your point, things that you don’t know. If you don’t know them, you can’t do anything about them until sometimes it’s too late. Now, you’ll learn from that, but that mistake in financial planning can cost you lots and lots of money and jeopardize the security of your retirement.

Steve Lewit: It could undermine your entire retirement. You’re playing with fire.

Gabriel Lewit: You’re playing with big stakes.

Steve Lewit: In retirement, when your paycheck stops, you are playing with fire unless you have an awful lot of money.

Gabriel Lewit: I’m going to segue into another one that’s on my list here, which these seem to segue well into each other. Well, one of the reasons why people oftentimes are DIYers, it’s more of the reluctant DIYer, but it turns into price shopping. I’m going to call this person the price shopper. Sometimes price shoppers, they’re looking for the lowest price, and oftentimes the lowest price is free, meaning I’ll just do it myself.

This can be the person that starts off with good intentions and goes around looking advisor to advisor for the cheapest fee, but then eventually just talks themselves out of the fee and back into DIYing it anyways because they can’t seem to justify paying any fee for something that they ultimately feel like they can do themselves.

Steve Lewit: And they don’t see the benefit of the fee. Why should I pay a fee? That guy or that gal’s not going to do any better than I can do.

Gabriel Lewit: Now, let’s assume for our price shopper example, obviously the extreme of that is you go back to being a DIYer. But for my next example of a personality, we’re going to use the price shopper that agrees that they need somebody to do it and is going to pick somebody, but they’re always shopping for the rock bottom price. What is the challenge with this when it comes to choosing a financial advisor?

Steve Lewit: What I ask people is I say, appreciate your shopping fees. Everybody wants to pay the lowest fee, but are you shopping price or you’re shopping quality? Because if you want more quality, you have to pay a higher price. It’s that simple.

Gabriel Lewit: Well, let me ask you a question. Name an example in life where you get the highest quality anything at the rock bottom or the lowest price point?

Steve Lewit: You mean like a good deal?

Gabriel Lewit: No, I’m just asking you the question. Can you name something?

Steve Lewit: No. No.

Gabriel Lewit: It’s pretty hard to think of something, right?

Steve Lewit: If I want to buy a better sports jacket, I’m not going to get it at… What’s that place that sells sports jackets for $300 or 400? The Man’s Shop or something.

Gabriel Lewit: If you find two dudes on the internet saying they’ll upgrade your bathroom for you, using that example, versus a highly experienced contracting firm with 100 five-star reviews that’s triple the price, the point is you’re likely going to get what you pay for.

Steve Lewit: But people think that they can find the same quality at a better price. But in our business, I think that quality is interpretive. In other words, look, we show people… I’ll just put it out there. We build wealth for people. We make them hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. And although we charge a fee, I think it’s insignificant in comparison to the amount of wealth we build. But if you don’t see that wealth, if you don’t understand it or don’t see it or don’t believe it, then the fee is a lot.

Gabriel Lewit: Again, not just talking purely about whether somebody’s willing to pay a fee, somebody is willing to pay a fee, they’re just looking for the cheapest price.

Steve Lewit: You mean shopping a fee?

Gabriel Lewit: Right. Okay, let me give you a different example. If somebody comes to us and we’re 0.85%, and then they say, “Well, I can go to Johnny I just met down the road. He says he’s going to charge me 0.45% and he’s going to do the same thing.”

Steve Lewit: Well, then you have a choice to make, but he’s not going to do the same thing.

Gabriel Lewit: That’s what I’m trying to get at.

Steve Lewit: Right. But the price shopper is so pain averse to paying a fee that they don’t look at the fee in relation to what you get, or they’ll justify it and say, “Well, he said he’s going to give me the same thing at half the price.” Well, if you believe that, then there’s nothing that we can do, then go give it a shot.

Gabriel Lewit: Well, what we often recommend in these examples when we have clients that do tell us, “Hey, I’ve talked to so-and-so that’s going to be 20 basis points less than you guys, and they say they’re going to do all the same things.” It’s one of the reasons why we highly encourage that no matter which advisor you’re thinking about using, you go through that process of a deeper dive, and you ask them to show you real life deliverables.

Steve Lewit: They say they’re going to do a tax plan. Okay, show me a tax plan.

Gabriel Lewit: Exactly. I’m going to do a financial plan for you. Show me what that plan looks like.

Steve Lewit: The finished product.

Gabriel Lewit: The finished product. We have multiple ways of planning income. Show me those examples of what those different ways are, not just say that you’re going to do it. It’s similar, again, to my renovation example. It would then be imagine you could walk through five or 10 finished products of the work that the cheaper contractor has done versus the higher level contractor. You know this. Anybody that shopped for a home knows this. On the surface, on the pictures, on Zillow, they look great, right?

Steve Lewit: Until you tap on the wall.

Gabriel Lewit: And then you walk into the house, and you just see it, right? You see it in the corners. You see it on the quality.

Steve Lewit: It’s sloppy.

Gabriel Lewit: Things aren’t lined up right. There’s an attention to detail and there’s a quality level, and those tend to start to disappear as you get lower and lower in price points. But if you just take it at the surface level, you’re never going to quite know enough to make that assessment.

Steve Lewit: Everybody wants a good deal, so everybody shops.

Gabriel Lewit: Now, to be fair, there are good deals out there. There legitimately are.

Steve Lewit: I think we’re a great deal.

Gabriel Lewit: There are some unicorns out there that really do provide equally or better service and value at a slightly lower price point. Those are the ones you want to be finding. Those are the ones you want to find.

Steve Lewit: But it’s not a matter of just looking for the lower price or higher price shouldn’t be the determining factor.

Gabriel Lewit: You got to get into the weeds to explore. You can’t just have a 10-minute call and say, “Oh, what do you do? Oh, we do home renovations. Great. What’s your price? It’s this. Okay, great. Let me go with you.” It’s got to be a little bit more detailed than that.

Steve Lewit: Yes, sir. Yes, sir. What’s the next transition logical?

Gabriel Lewit: I don’t have actually…

Steve Lewit: You don’t a logical one because the first three ran into each other.

Gabriel Lewit: They did kind of run into each other. We’ve got a few others. Hopefully you’re enjoying this, folks. I think these are interesting. From our vantage point, we’ve encountered so many different types of people. I think there’s value in sharing this with you, our listeners, so you can get a sense of who you are.

Steve Lewit: Is there a doomsday thing on your list?

Gabriel Lewit: There’s not, but there probably should be. The next one on our hit list here is what we call the over-analyzer. This is the person, not so much that… They’ll usually pick an advisor, for example, relatively easily, but then when it gets time to build their plan, they want to review, review, review, compare, compare, review, review.

Steve Lewit: Could we look at it this way? Could we look at it that way? What if we did this? What if we did that? Where did you get your assumptions? It’s like, all right.

Gabriel Lewit: Every single thought, every single recommendation, every single alternative, every single which way until you drive yourself into analysis paralysis mode. And then the same person can’t make a decision because they’re so concerned about making the right decision, but now they got 200 options.

Steve Lewit: Yes. I think there’s a balance because understanding the numbers and understanding your decision is really very important.

Gabriel Lewit: Of course. 100% not saying that having some options and comparing some details and reviewing some assumptions… It’s very important.

Steve Lewit: It’s like going shopping for a car. You can go to dealer to dealer to dealer to dealer, and then you reach a point, it’s like, I don’t know what car to buy.

Gabriel Lewit: Right. Well, let’s say you decide to go to every single car dealership in town and test drive every single model.

Steve Lewit: Yeah, it’s like okay.

Gabriel Lewit: And now you’ve test driven 50 cars and you like 20 of them. What do you do?

Steve Lewit: Maybe I’ll wait six months and see if the prices go down, then I’ll become a price shopper.

Gabriel Lewit: Exactly.

Steve Lewit: But since I’ve been burned by car salesman before, I won’t buy anything.

Gabriel Lewit: I’ll just keep my used car. What do you if you know that you’re in a… Most people know if they’re highly detailed over-analyzers. I happen to be an over-analyzer, as an example.

Steve Lewit: I don’t think so.

Gabriel Lewit: To a point. I’ve tried to limit my…

Steve Lewit: You’re extremely detailed. I’m detailed. You’re extremely detailed.

Gabriel Lewit: I am.

Steve Lewit: I’ll roll with some things. Like I’ll say to you, “I’m rolling with that,” and you say, “How can you do that?”

Gabriel Lewit: ‘m a perfectionist. There’s a rule in business which is if you wait for something to be perfect, you’ll never get it done. You should aim for 80% and then try to move forward with it. It’s similar when you’re making decision. If you’re waiting for that perfect decision to present itself, you’re probably never going to find it. You’ve got to give yourself some criteria points. You give yourself some boundaries. And then when you feel like you’ve checked off most of those, you’ve got to then decide to move in a direction.

Steve Lewit: You can get into a situation where it’s just never good enough. And then if it’s just never good enough, then you’ll never do it.

Gabriel Lewit: Exactly. All right. Now, there’s a few different names that we’ve come up with for this one before, but we used to call it hope-itis.

Steve Lewit: Hope-itis. The hope is not a plan it is.

Gabriel Lewit: Hope-itis. Now we came up with a new name for the show here, because we were trying to think of catchy names for these, which is the ostrich.

Steve Lewit: Yes, we did. I remember talking about that one.

Gabriel Lewit: The ostrich just buries their head in the sand and ignores all that is around them because their head is buried in the sand, and they can’t see what’s going on.

Steve Lewit: I don’t want to know anything.

Gabriel Lewit: Hope-itis is when you say, “Well, I’m just going to hope it works out for the best.”

Steve Lewit: I’m going to wing it.

Gabriel Lewit: When they start thinking about what all could go wrong, they just get so worried and stressed out about it that they’d rather just ignore it all and retreat back into their cave and let things happen that will happen.

Steve Lewit: You can see it every time we bring up long-term health issues.

Gabriel Lewit: Huge. Huge.

Steve Lewit: Let’s talk about the future. No, I won’t live that long.

Gabriel Lewit: It didn’t happen to anybody in my family.

Steve Lewit: No, I don’t want to talk about it.

Gabriel Lewit: Similar oftentimes with younger kids and families and life insurance. I’ll get into conversations about how much coverage should be the right amount. Oh, no, they’ll be fine without it. Just a little bit of turning.

Steve Lewit: I’m young.

Gabriel Lewit: These are these more emotionally charged things that cause you to… They’re uncomfortable to think about.

Steve Lewit: We had a pretty good harmony there.

Gabriel Lewit: What do you do when things are uncomfortable to think about them? You punt them away from you.

Steve Lewit: Or you sublimate them.

Gabriel Lewit: You bury your head in the sand like an ostrich.

Steve Lewit: It’s very difficult to deal with an ostrich, folks, because we demonstrate things that could go wrong. A person might be financially very sound, but there are things that could go wrong. We’ll say, “Here’s a hurdle I think we need to get you over. Have you looked at this? What do you think about this?” And an ostrich really just doesn’t want to discuss them. It’s like, “No, no, probably not.”

Gabriel Lewit: I mean, it’s kind of like if there’s a storm outside, instead of facing it, you just go back inside and shut the blinds.

Steve Lewit: The heck with it.

Gabriel Lewit: Next time I open the blinds, hopefully it’ll be sunny.

Steve Lewit: Yeah, exactly.

Gabriel Lewit: It’s a very natural human reaction, but it’s also one where if you see the storm out there, you should be prepping your house to… Hopefully it’s not this severe of a storm, but the goal is to make sure everything is prepared so that the storm should pass, not impact you. Whereas if you’re unprepared because you just closed the blinds, that storm could roll in and, sure enough, damage your home or whatever the case might be. You ignored it because you just shut the blinds.

Steve Lewit: I think the other part of this, Gabriel, is that we all have so much on our minds. We’re busy.

Gabriel Lewit: Busy, busy, busy.

Steve Lewit: Issues with life and kids and retirement. Should I work? Should I not work. I don’t like this. Relationship issues. There’s so much going on. And then we say, “You really need to talk about your money.” People are just tired. They’re just like, “Nah, I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to worry anymore. I don’t want to think about this.”

Gabriel Lewit: We’ll cover this later again.

Steve Lewit: I’ll just numb myself out. I understand it, but it’s not a great decision.

Gabriel Lewit: Well, what I’m noticing here, folks, is we’re going to have time for one more of these. We had a much longer list than I am anticipated.

Steve Lewit: Yeah, we do. We have a long list.

Gabriel Lewit: Or maybe we just enjoyed talking about them and didn’t just want to do them surface level justice and really give them some tea.

Steve Lewit: We spent more time than I thought we were.

Gabriel Lewit: We’re going to do what we did last time when we had not enough time. We’ll make this a two-parter. Next week, we’ll continue with our remaining ones, and then we’ll talk a little bit about some best practices with working with these, as well as our listener questions, of course, that we didn’t get to. Sorry, guys. We’ll get to you next week.

Steve Lewit: We seem to do that. We’ve got to change our methodology.

Gabriel Lewit: Well, sometimes we have these deeper dives, and we really get into them.

Steve Lewit: We do.

Gabriel Lewit: Let’s pick one more of these here. Let me see. Dad, we’ve got a few others. I’m going to give you the names here, guys, so you get excited for next time. Here are our remaining personalities. Well, we have two options for you, the doomsday prepper or the silo stalker.

Steve Lewit: That’s the one I want to do.

Gabriel Lewit: Silo stalker.

Steve Lewit: They’re the same. Did we split those up?

Gabriel Lewit: Well, silo stalker is more like if you have a farm, you’d stock your silo. But doomsday prepper could be anywhere.

Steve Lewit: That’s true.

Gabriel Lewit: Similar things there. You’ve got, we’re calling it, if you’ve ever seen this movie, oldie but goody, the odd couple. Husbands and wives, spouses that don’t agree, polar opposite personality types. What does that do with your planning? Some interesting options there to discuss. The gambler.

Steve Lewit: Yeah, I love that.

Gabriel Lewit: Or the risk-taker.

Steve Lewit: Yep.

Gabriel Lewit: And then we’ve got the model citizen. You might guess what some of these are, but you’re going to have to tune back in for some of the good options and details here. And then I’m going to add one last one to here. This is the trend follower.

Steve Lewit: That’s a good one. We didn’t think of that.

Gabriel Lewit: I just thought of it on the fly actually.

Steve Lewit: Yeah, that’s a good one.

Gabriel Lewit: The trend follower. I’m going to do one last one. We’re going to do a few extras.

Steve Lewit: There’s another one?

Gabriel Lewit: There is. The Googler.

Steve Lewit: The Googler.

Gabriel Lewit: I’m thinking more of these on the fly as we’re talking.

Steve Lewit: This list could go on.

Gabriel Lewit: It probably could.

Steve Lewit: This might be a three show deal. I hope folks are enjoying it.

Gabriel Lewit: I hope so too. Well, you can probably guess what the Googler is.

Steve Lewit: Yeah, we know that.

Gabriel Lewit: It’s someone that Google’s everything. It goes with healthcare too, the Googler.

Steve Lewit: Definitely.

Gabriel Lewit: I’m a Googler.

Steve Lewit: Are you?

Gabriel Lewit: For healthcare. I Google everything. Well, we’ll talk about some of the pros and cons with that. Well, I’ll tell you on the healthcare side, I assume everything’s going to kill me, everything that goes wrong with me.

Steve Lewit: If you Google it, it will kill you.

Gabriel Lewit: That’s what I’m saying. It’s not exactly recommended.

Steve Lewit: Everything you Google will kill you.

Gabriel Lewit: Yes, exactly. Oh man.

Steve Lewit: If you Google a cold, it says, “Well,” then at the end it says, “Go see your doctor because even a cold could kill you.”

Gabriel Lewit: A fever could be just a cold. It could be a stomach bug.

Steve Lewit: Or the end of your life.

Gabriel Lewit: Death on the doorstep. All right. Well, let’s pause here. Thank you guys for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed watching the show today.

Steve Lewit: The TV. I hope I look good on TV.

Gabriel Lewit: Listening to the show. Just kidding, folks. We enjoyed having some time here with you. If you’ve got questions on any of these personalities, or you have any others that you can think of that you want us to talk about on the next show, give us a holler, 847-499-3330, or email us, info@sglfinancial.com. Again, send us your questions. If you have anything we can help you with, give us a call to schedule a meeting. Otherwise, we will keep chatting with you a bit more on the next show.

Steve Lewit: I just want to say, Gabriel, that one of the things that makes our job fun are these personalities. I mean, that’s why I love doing what I do.

Gabriel Lewit: I think it’s important that we recognize as advisors that everybody is different.

Steve Lewit: And respect it. It’s not like you shouldn’t be that way. How do we work with you?

Gabriel Lewit: Let me clarify, none of these are bad. All of these are human. They’re normal. Everybody has their, as you say or I’ve heard you say in the past, tapes of the past that they’ve played that brings them to where they are today. And part of it is being self-reflective enough to recognize yourself in the mirror and then make decisions that can really be positively beneficial for you.

Steve Lewit: I call it shtick. Everybody has their shtick.

Gabriel Lewit: There it is.

Steve Lewit: A technical word.

Gabriel Lewit: The technical word. Thanks, folks. Have a wonderful rest of your week, and we will talk to you next time.

Steve Lewit: Stay well, everybody.

Gabriel Lewit: Bye now.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Our 2 Cents with Steve and Gabriel Lewit. For any questions about your finances, give SGL a call at 847-499-3330 or visit us on the web at sglfinancial.com and be sure to subscribe to join us on next week’s episode.

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