For some people, the biggest problem with their financial planning isn’t that they make the wrong decisions. It’s that they often fail to make decisions at all. But sometimes you just have to fish or cut bait. Poop or get off the pot. Decide and move forward. Let’s discuss some of the things that can cause the decision-making process to stall and how you can get unstuck.Find out more information about Brian Butler and Beyond The Pie Charts here: https://www.wealthstandardfinancial.com/Full transcript below...----more----Transcript:Marc Killian: Hey, everybody. Welcome back into another exciting edition of Beyond Pie Charts. Thanks for tuning into our podcast here with Brian Butler, president and wealth management advisor at Wealth Standard Financial, serving you here in the greater Houston area from the office in Houston. Make sure that you find Brian and the team online at wealthstandardfinancial.com. That's wealthstandardfinancial.com. While you're there, you'll see a little link at the top, says podcast. You can click on that and check out some past episodes as well as the blog that goes along with it, and of course we'd always appreciate you liking, sharing, and all that good kind of stuff. You'll also see on the right hand side where you can subscribe to it on various platforms. If you have not done so yet, we would certainly appreciate it. This is, I believe, episode number five, and so, Brian, welcome in. How are you?Brian Butler: Good, man. How are you?Marc Killian: I'm doing fantastic. Good to talk with you. We were chatting just briefly before we got this thing rolling. You've got some fun stuff coming up, sort of, I guess. You said you'd call it kind of sort of not a vacation but maybe. You get to go to a wedding for the family.Brian Butler: Yep. My little brother is getting married.Marc Killian: Very cool.Brian Butler: He's my 30 year old brother, which still sounds crazy to me, because I changed his diapers.Marc Killian: Oh, okay.Brian Butler: But he's getting married in Mexico, and so the reason why I say that it's somewhat of a vacation is, number one, at least we'll be on the beach.Marc Killian: Exactly.Brian Butler: But number two, we'll have a crazy three year old running around with it. And I'm the best man in the wedding, so-Marc Killian: That's a lot of responsibility.Brian Butler: Right. So it's somewhat of a vacation, but a little bit of work for me too.Marc Killian: That's all right.Brian Butler: But I would do it all day every day.Marc Killian: There you go. Well that's cool. Congratulations to the new couple and I hope everything goes wonderful and you guys have a fantastic time down there. Where are you going in Mexico?Brian Butler: Playa Mujeres.Marc Killian: Yeah, I know exactly where that's at. No, I'm kidding.Brian Butler: Yeah. It's about a 40 minute drive from the airport in Cancun.Marc Killian: Oh, okay. All right. All right. Very cool. Very cool. Well, I'll tell you what. Now so you're in the Houston area, and we talked about this a little bit before. You're born and raised, right?Brian Butler: Yep, born and raised.Marc Killian: Okay. So did you ever go fishing? Did you ever go with a grandparent or anything like that? Did you like to go fishing at all?Brian Butler: You know, growing up, that wasn't one of the things that we did.Marc Killian: Okay.Brian Butler: But it became one of the things I've done as an adult more and more.Marc Killian: Gotcha. Okay. So are you familiar with the term "fish or cut bait?"Brian Butler: Absolutely. The brother I'm going to see is on his way to being a professional bass fisherman, if that tells you anything.Marc Killian: Oh, wow. Okay. Well, I did not... See, look, this is, happy coincidences. So this is the topic of conversation I wanted to go with today. I did not know about the brother or the professional fisherman, so that's pretty awesome. Okay, so this'll be even more fun. So what I wanted to do was kind of use that term, Brian, and people familiar with it should realize what it means. It basically means either fish or cut the bait loose and move on, right? Make a decision, basically. Right?Brian Butler: Absolutely.Marc Killian: So same kind of thing, you know, with financial decisions, we can kind of get into this situation where we just freeze, we just don't do anything. Sometimes you have to, as the saying goes, blank or get off the pot, right? You got to do something. So let's talk a little bit about how we can get stuck and maybe ways to get unstuck, if you will, when it comes to making financial decisions. So, for example, clearly there's, a lot of times there's just so many to make that people do get overwhelmed. There's just, you'll have people come in and see you, and I'm sure they say, "Brian, there's so many decisions to make." How do you get started?Brian Butler: Well, think about all the different issues that come to play in our retirement planning. When to take social security. Whether or not to take the spousal benefit on your pension, if you have one. Whether or not you should have life insurance. Where to invest for income. Where to invest for growth. Where to factor in tax planning. Et cetera. And it just paralyzes some people, and they don't know where to start, so they just put it off for as long as possible, which it becomes a major issue when they get ready to retire.Marc Killian: Well where's a baby step to start? If someone was saying, "Yes, this is where I'm stuck, how could they get themselves unstuck? Is there a baby step or two that kind of maybe helps along that path?Brian Butler: Well, one step is to know where your money is. So if you use an app like mint.com where you consolidate all your credit cards, your bank statements, investment accounts, so you can see where you stand right now, that gives you an initial picture where you need to be, but if decision making is really difficult for you, get some help. Find a financial planner. Find a financial advisor. Ask a friend that you've seen be successful with their money. Get some help and some guidance to just get organized. I would say that's the number one thing that you should do is get organized, know where you stand, and then from there it makes the decision making process a little bit easier. It's going to help when you see all these things and you can prioritize what you want to accomplish first. By having a list and a written plan, it always allows you to come back and revisit.Marc Killian: Okay. So now some people might say, "Well let's do a little research as a place to start." And that's probably a good idea, except for the fact that this little thing called Google can sometimes overload you with a little too much research. So if you're kind of finding yourself Google slapped, for lack of a better term, where if you type in "annuity," for example, you're going to get like four billion pages that come up. So how should we caution ourselves when it comes to the research factor?Brian Butler: Well, what I found, most people research too much, and then paralysis by analysis. People say that all the time, but it's 100% true. Anytime you're doing research, you're going to find the extremes of one topic to another. Give you an example. If you Google "are apples good for me," you're going to see half the searches say apples aren't good for you because apple seeds have arsenic, and then the other half is going to say apples are good for you. I would have to say most know that apples are good for them, but just doing a Google search will give you some crazy options out there, just the opposite of what you would think.Marc Killian: Okay. So would it be a situation where sometimes if there's a particular item or something that you're most curious about, to do a little research but take some of that with a grain of salt, just arm yourself with some basic information so that when you do go sit down with a financial professional in your area, they're not necessarily speaking Greek and going over your head?Brian Butler: I would give you another example.Marc Killian: Okay.Brian Butler: Just know the motivation of the writer.Marc Killian: Okay, all right, true.Brian Butler: So if it's an insurance product, was it written by an insurance agent? If it's an investment product, is it just written by an investment company? Just know where their motivation is. Not saying that they're giving you wrong information, but just understand, okay, if an insurance company is telling you never to buy insurance, well, something's wrong with that picture. Just understand where the information's coming from.Marc Killian: The motivation. Yeah. Okay. Very cool, very cool. I like that. All right, so then let's talk about, if we're talking about getting stuck on financial decisions, just the general confusion that sometimes hits people when it comes to... I'll use myself. I'll throw myself under the bus. Math was not my strong suit. So like if we go out and I'm going to quickly figure up a tip or something like that, my wife will figure it out and say something before I even have a chance to get to it. And so sometimes it can be off-putting for people who say, "Well, math isn't my thing," or, "Finances aren't my thing."Brian Butler: Well, for some people finances, or anything related to math, are just generally confusing.Marc Killian: Right.Brian Butler: And many of these people just end up burying their heads in the sand and ignoring everything about their finances as long as they can, because that seems easier than getting frustrated as they try to learn it. And so, again, it all goes back to help, finding a trusted provider that knows what they're talking about that can help teach you the process. You need a teacher in those situations. So if your advisor is not really trying to teach you all the steps and things that you need to know, you have to question that, because we're teachers in general and we want people to be educated so in turn they know why they own certain investments. And so we want to arm clients with the ability to tell a friend at a cocktail party why they own this particular portfolio and what their advisor does for them. And if I can do that, my job is totally successful.Marc Killian: Okay. So I was thinking about it this way. So for some people, they don't want to know all the nuts and bolts. That's why they're hiring an advisor, right? They're like, "I don't understand it, I don't really want to know everything," but a good working knowledge just so that you're familiar and comfortable and can talk about the things that you do own and why you have them, that makes sense. So that's what you're saying, right?Brian Butler: Yeah. Generally, people that hire us are outsourcers. They want to outsource that part of their lives so that they can go on and enjoy what they do for a living or what they do in retirement and their grandkids and just let us worry about the day to day.Marc Killian: Okay. Very cool, very cool. So let me ask you, when you're sitting down with potential new clients, do you have people come in who say things... I've talked to advisors all across the country, I host a lot of shows, and you'll get people that come in and say, "I need help with my retirement accounts, my investments, but I don't like to talk about money." And so then pulling the information out of them is kind of like pulling a tooth. So do you have people like that where it's just a struggle to get them to open up?Brian Butler: Well, you know, many people don't like talking about money. It was a taboo subject for a lot of people, and they grew up with it being a source of frustration, and the last thing they want to do is talk about it with a stranger. And the way I try to frame that is let's talk about your goals, rather than just talk about money. We can back into the money piece by you telling me what you want to accomplish, what some of your fears are, and how we can help mitigate some of those circumstances. And if we can do that, it makes the conversation about them and about their lives rather than the nuts and bolts and dollars and cents, and it really helps bring people's anxiety down, and I can see it as they sit on our couch in our office, that once we start talking about what they truly want to accomplish and what's important to them and what they value most, it makes it a lot easier conversation when you're talking about money.Marc Killian: Well, you're listening to us here on the podcast with Brian Butler. We're talking about fish or cut bait, if you will, basically getting stuck on financial decisions, maybe how to get unstuck a little bit, and our final one here on the podcast would be obviously the traumatic life events that are going to happen. In what you do for a living, it's inevitable that some big life moments do come up, and they're not always the most pleasant. There are some negative ones, clearly, and that can cause people to have a hard time making a decision.Brian Butler: No, absolutely.Marc Killian: And so how do you address that, if it's the unfortunate, like the death of a spouse or something like that?Brian Butler: Well, we had recently a former client come in and we were catching up. We had been trying to get him in the office for a couple of years, and he finally decided to come in, and he said he'd had a rough time and that his stocks and everything were doing well, but when I asked what was the rough time, he told us that his wife passed away a couple years ago. And anytime you have a client and they go through that death of a spouse, when you've been married 50 plus years, that's a traumatic event.Marc Killian: Sure, yeah.Brian Butler: His trauma was not financial, because he's a multi-millionaire.Marc Killian: Oh, okay, well.Brian Butler: But it's very emotional. And so anytime you go through those situations, the emotion can cause you to make bad decisions depending on who you are. What you want to do anytime a traumatic event like that happens is have a good support network and people to talk to, whether that be a financial advisor, whether that be a friend, church members, whoever, so that that way you can have someone to talk to and bounce different things off of, ask opinions about financial matters, and many times people are going through the same thing, or know someone that's going through the same thing as you are, and if you can get that information and get that support network going, it's going to make life a lot easier.Marc Killian: Yeah, and traumatic life events, when you're talking about in the pre-retirement or retirement stage, you know, could be the loss of a job, if it's right before you plan to retire. That could definitely throw a monkey in the wrench, if you will. Divorce, obviously. A major illness. Death of a spouse, as we covered. And it does take those emotional tolls, but it also can cause us to freeze up on the financial matters. You don't have to necessarily rush into a decision after something like the death of a spouse, but you do need to, at some point, put some focus on it, and you can't just turn a blind eye to that because you still have to go on and figure out what's the best steps from a financial standpoint. And a lot of times, especially with the death of a spouse, that may mean, now, obviously the loss of a significant portion of the income. That's going to change the taxes. That one gets overlooked a lot, Brian, when the death of a spouse does happen is how the tax rates change, because you're so used to married, filing jointly, type of situation, and now you're in a different tax bracket.Brian Butler: Yeah, absolutely. Taxes, we've seen, most people don't plan well enough for the taxes that are coming. So traditionally everyone puts their money in tax-deferred accounts, and anytime a spouse dies, you still get some tax benefit, but the next generation, in estate planning, everything changes. So anytime something like that happens, your estate plan and the legacy that you're able to lose is definitely going to change, not to mention just the emotional toll. So there are a lot of factors that go into planning anytime somebody's going through that type of transition, whether it be the job, divorce, illness, death, and it's one of the things that we spend most of the time talking about with clients are the things they value most and the things that they want to protect, and that's why our tagline for Wealth Standard Financial is "When special care is needed." And so we want to help people go through these hard situations so that they can be happy on the other side.Marc Killian: Well, there you go folks. Well, that's our podcast for this week, so when special care is needed, you got questions, reach out to Brian and the team at Wealth Standard Financial. Our topic this week was getting stuck on financial decisions, and sometimes you got to fish and/or cut bait. So reach out to him, (713)955-6007. That's your number to call if you have some immediate questions you want to get addressed. That's (713)955-6007. Brian Butler is the president and wealth management advisor at Wealth Standard Financial, serving you here in the Houston area. And don't forget, check us out online at wealthstandardfinancial.com, subscribe to the podcast, share with friends and family, people that you think might benefit from us, and check out the blog while you're there as well. And Brian, thanks for your time, buddy. I'll see you again here pretty soon, and good luck on the upcoming trip to Mexico.Brian Butler: All right, man, see you next week.Marc Killian: All right, take care now.