Five Psychological Biases Ruining Your Finances With John De Goey

Today, I sit down with John De Goey, portfolio manager, author, and podcast host of Make Better Wealth Decisions, to discuss how psychology influences our financial choices. With over three decades of experience, Mr. De Goey has dedicated his career to helping people avoid common traps and make smarter decisions about money.

In this episode, we break down five key psychological biases that often lead to poor financial outcomes: time neglect, recency bias, herding, optimism bias, and risk-seeking behavior. Mr. De Goey explains how these biases shape our saving, investing, and spending habits, and why being aware of them is the first step toward building long-term wealth. From the tendency to delay retirement savings to the dangers of following the crowd, his insights highlight how our mindset can be just as important as our income.

We also talk about the role of misinformation, financial influencers, and consumer culture in pushing people toward bad decisions. Mr. De Goey emphasizes that while optimism and risk-taking can drive progress, unchecked confidence often blinds us to reality. He shares practical tools for managing biases, setting realistic expectations, and focusing on purpose-driven financial planning.

https://www.johndegoey.ca/

https://open.spotify.com/show/164ZrmvuxArL6kGYLCRPV3

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*Couple O' Nukes LLC and Mr. Whiskey are not licensed medical entities, nor do they take responsibility for any advice or information put forth by guests. Take all advice at your own risk.

Transcript

 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Couple of Nukes. As always, I'm your host, Mr. Whiskey, and every day, every single day. We are making financial decisions and today we're gonna talk about making better wealth decisions. We all want more money. Most of us are spenders, right? And we have a lot we're chasing after in life.

And so it's not always how much money are we making? But how much are we spending? Or rather, what are we spending it on? Right? Going back to every decision has consequences. Some good, some bad. So we are here today with a financial expert to get into our decision making when it comes to finances. Mr. John de Goi, so great to have you here, and could you please introduce yourself for us?

Sure. Thanks for having me. I am a author and a podcaster of my own. I have a podcast called Make Better Wealth Decisions. So those are things that I do for fun. But my day job is I'm a portfolio manager, meaning I manage money for ordinary retail investors in Toronto, Canada. I've been doing I've been giving advice to people for over 32 years, so you can see how gray my hair is.

I'm, i've been around the block a few times and I'm really passionate about helping ordinary people make better wealth decisions. 'cause a lot of people make decisions that they have good intentions, but they don't know what they don't know, and they make mistakes and I'm trying to help them to navigate all the curiosities and hidden little traps that people might otherwise fall into.

For sure. And given your age, you've gotten to kind of see how. Social media and technology has rapidly increased marketing and consumerism, especially with online ads being everywhere with the targeting of the algorithm. You know, I mean everyone here knows that you just so much as say a word and suddenly your phone's got one time we were joking about pickleball on a podcast episode, and so then I started getting asked for pickleball gear.

I've never played pickleball in my life, nor looked it up on my phone, so. I'm not gonna, how did that happen? I don't know. Right. But I had a guest say, they say we live in a day and age of information, the day and age of the internet.

And he said, no. We live in a day and age of marketing, of people fighting for the top spots on Google when it comes to searching for people, paying top dollar for ads. So what can you say about all that? So I agree with the sentiment. I had a guest on my podcast a couple of weeks ago who helps people put out videos and podcasts.

So he's actually a guy that I use in coaching in my own practice. And he says that one of the great things about doing videos and being out there in terms of on YouTube and whatnot, is that it allows you to build trust with scale. And so that is the sort of thing that's the marketing that you're referring to.

But the other thing that is both good and bad for people like myself, if you're accredited, if you've taken the time to do the coursework, to offer good, solid, well-rounded. Evidence-based, comprehensive financial advice. A lot of people that do what I do for a living can sometimes be frust frustrated by these so-called influencers.

People who Yeah, will put out a, a YouTube video and they'll get a hundred thousand views and they won't know what they're talking about. And it's very frustrating that. People who don't know what they're talking about, build trust with scale. When they don't have trust and they don't, they don't deserve trust and they don't have a background.

And meanwhile, the people who give advice on a one-to-one basis, and because I am as old as you acknowledged. People who have been giving advice for a long time, were trained that you give advice in a micro level, in a one-on-one basis. You sit across from someone at their kitchen table and you give them targeted, specific advice that is customized to their circumstances.

That's. Pretty much the opposite of putting out a YouTube video where you just say, just do this, and you, you, you put out generic advice and it doesn't matter if the person who's listening it is 26 or 66, they'll watch the video and they won't really go through the next first derivative questions about, well, this might be good in general, but how do my circumstances dovetail with that, right?

What's different and what should I be doing? What should I be thinking about that might cause me to do things a bit differently or a bit more, or whatever, you know, how could I change this maybe because of a spouse, what have you. So it's a, it's a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's a wonderful time to be alive because we are reaching people.

And there's a lot of good out there. But the problem is there's also a lot of misinformation out there, and a lot of people don't have the tools, which is part of my mission, is to help give people tools to make better wealth decisions because they can't separate good advice from less than good advice.

All, all they know is, you know, that guy sounds good. He seems to know what he is talking about. And a confident attitude can oftentimes hide a lack of actual training. Exactly. A lot of people don't fact check. They just say, oh, you know, some person said on the internet they have a YouTube dedicated finances.

Of course, they know what they're talking about. And sometimes the recent, you know, I could say with the day and age of celebration and social media, it's maybe not that, Hey, this guy looks like he's a marketing expert. It's like. Hey, this chick's cute and she's talking about money and I, I wanna have both at once.

You know, unfortunately, that's kind of the market we're competing in is with popularity, with looks and all this nonsense. Like you said, it's not actual trust or knowledge, it's just based on what is catchy. Sometimes it's because of some person is doing bandwagon trends that are trending on social media, right?

There's a lot of different tactics being deployed now in terms of how you. Target with, especially with the shortening and the declining attention span of the new generations as well as even older generations. Also, I have the disadvantage that I, I have a face that's made for radio. So, that's a real challenge for some of us.

I mean, obviously if some people actually wanna get a chance to and that's why when you watch the, the evening news, a lot of the weather people, weather ladies in particular are really good looking and they, where, where it's gonna be dresses, it's like, well, if I gotta, if I gotta see what the weather's gonna be like tomorrow, I, I may as well at least ease my eyes while I'm doing it.

Right. So that is a challenge. There's no question. Yeah. And I think one of the things you mentioned also on top of like the way people are choosing what information they listen to is again the misinformation. And recently I had an episode on Stoicism and one of the things we talked about is that word and that definition and how that's implemented in life is being very misrepresented online.

There's a lot of new. Almost, I don't wanna say branches, but people have really changed stoicism from its classic definition from its time period to certain trends on Instagram and other social media platforms. And we talked about this, a lot of misinformation. And my guess in particular said he doesn't necessarily get mad about misinformation and try to destroy all of it.

He said all he can do is put out good right information to help combat it. And you know, ultimately people are gonna have to decipher through it. And it, that's just kind of how it is. So you mentioned you've been giving advice for several decades here, that you work with money all day, and then in your free time you also work with money.

How did you get into all this? Like going all the way back to when you were a young lad, were you. A penny pincher. Were you a spender? Did you have any relationship with money at all? That was more than the average? No. I'm a Canadian. I grew up south of Detroit on the Canadian side of the border, so I grew up about 45 minutes outside of Detroit.

So I'm a Tiger fan and, you know, and so forth. But I grew up on a farm. My parents were immigrants and I didn't really give money a lot of thought. I had a fairly ordinary middle class upbringing. But I did my undergraduate degree and then went on to do a master's degree in Ottawa, Canada, and I wanted to work as a, I was doing a Master's in public administration, which is like a master's in business administration, except it's for government.

So I was thinking of being a career civil servant. And a lot of the coursework that you do for a Master's in public administration is identical or nearly identical to a master's in business administration. So I had a background in micro and macroeconomics and accounting and what have you.

The program that I was in was a co-op program. So I got a chance to sit in on committee hearings looking into the goods and services tax in the Parliament Hill. And I also got a chance in one of my other work terms to do some work with a department called Consumer and Corporate Affairs. And I had to look into, for instance, what the credit card rates were across the country and report back and make disclosures about that.

And I realized as I was doing my work in the work term that there were certain things in the financial services industry that were. Not as, they weren't unethical, but they're harmful to consumers and a lot of consumers weren't really aware of, the rates they were paying on their credit card and the importance of paying off your monthly balance every month.

And it dawned on me then when I was still in school that I was a bit of a consumer advocate. And I think I realized I was a consumer advocate before I thought of myself as being a finance guy. But then I moved from Ottawa to Toronto and looked for work and I couldn't find work in the public sector.

And I ended up working in finance because anybody can start a career in finance. Basically, you're your own boss and you have to actually find your own clients and make your own, basically, I created a job for myself when I was 30 years old. And I've enjoyed it immensely, but it was not something that I thought of when I was young.

And if you'd have asked me, even when I was, let's say, 25 years old, would you, what would you be doing as a career for the totality of your life if your working life. Working as a financial advisor was not even on my radar when I was 25, and I started when I was 30. So it's something that just evolved at a later point because I couldn't find work in my chosen field and I had to take my skillset.

And as the saying goes, when life hands you a lemon, you make lemonade. And I had a background in micro and macroeconomics and I understood the economy and I was concerned for consumers and wanted to be an advocate for decision making. So I. Just gravitated toward that, but there was no grand plan.

It was almost accidental. Right. I can relate to the not liking people getting scammed because when it comes to money, there are a lot of scams out there in all kinds of degrees and even very subtle degrees that are just built into systems. So I completely agree with that. Wanting to help people.

People work very hard for their money. Well not everyone, but a lot of people, most people had to work pretty hard for their money. Right. And so to just see people who don't work so hard, take it away, you know, that does pain my heart. And so you said earlier about with this kind of formatting, well, lemme pause before I say that.

At what point did the podcast come about? At what point did you say, Hey, you know, I've got all this great knowledge collected over decades. I worked with people one-on-one, but time for me to reach that more broad general audience and funnel people back. When did the podcast come into play? Thank you for asking.

So I've, in addition to do doing all these other things, I've also written three books and my most recent book is they're over my shoulder called Bull Shift. It's about optimism bias and how the financial services industry shifts your attention to make you feel bullish. And the podcast was launched in late 2022 when the book came out.

Technically the book was January of 2023. So the podcast, I had two or three episodes before the book was in bookstores across the country. But the podcast was an idea of, okay, I've gotta find ways. To reach people. What can I do? I can write books. I've written articles for national newspapers. I I can, I, I've appeared on TV and answered questions like I'm doing with you right now, but I thought a better way for me to control the content, the narrative, who the guests are, what we cover.

Was if I could, again, be my own boss and take the bull by the horns and start my own podcast. And so I started the podcast in very late 2022. So we're coming up on three years now. And how would you say, I'm just curious, as a fellow podcast, or how has your experience been over three years?

Was it a lot more difficult than you expected? Was it a lot more fun than you expected? Was it more frustrating? How has your experience been overall? I think most, well, you tell me, Mr. Whiskey my view is that podcasts you, you have to work a really long time in order to get a following and and so it's frustrating just like with anything else.

If you're trying to break through and reach a large number of people and say, this is really important, and, and grab them by the lapels and shake them into. Taking action into understanding the things that you believe are really important. It takes a long time to get traction. And so, I can't say that I'm surprised.

I am a bit frustrated by it, but it's been a pleasant thing. I, I enjoy doing it. People, you know, come up to me. They say they, you know, they enjoy it. And it's nice to, I feel that I'm giving back and, and helping to educate the public and make better wealth decisions. And so I'm glad I've done it. But it's been a little bit of a harder road than I thought it would've been, but it is what it is.

I 100% agree. I've had a lot of conversations on both my show and other podcasts about. Podcasting industry statistics, the reality of it, the expectations, advice for new podcasters. And for me, I quickly learned because of the conferences I attended in the shows and people I worked with to have that marathon mentality of long-term goals, not thinking short-term goals of not doing it for a huge crowd today or tomorrow, but hey, maybe 10 years from now.

I'm gonna be on national news and everyone's gonna go back and listen to the old episode. So I try to make everything evergreen, make everything for the day and age when people do check it out. Right. So I definitely, in the beginning was frustrated with, oh, the biggest thing that frustrates me, actually, I'm sure you can relate to this, was as we mentioned earlier, there are stuff on YouTube and social media that will get, you know, hundreds of thousands of likes and it's just like a five second.

You know, for lack of better words, BS video, right? Yeah. And it gets all these shares and stuff, and then you put out genuine financial advice. I put out suicide prevention and addiction recovery stuff, and it just. It's not trendy, you know? Right. And so it's frustrating because people are like, oh, well, you know, Mr.

Whiskey, maybe your audience isn't on social media, your audience is on LinkedIn, or it's on YouTube, that everywhere. Right? There are certain spaces that it'll trend a little bit better. At the end of the day, most people just like this, dare I say it, brain rot. You know, it's a very unfortunate, but I always remind myself,

I kind of look at what I do. Interestingly enough, you know, you mentioned earlier the one-on-one versus the broad and how the internet is kind of like this huge outreach, but I kind of look at podcasting as different than YouTube and social media. For me, podcasting kind of is that one-on-one experience.

Again, whoever I'm talking to, I don't have the specifics about whatever it is, but I make my episodes for that one person that needs to hear it, for that one person that it just connects with on a different level, you know? And that's the thing I kind of, I leave it up to God, me personally, I say, God, you know who needs to hear this?

And when they need to. It might be when I'm dead, you know, a hundred years from now, or it might be tomorrow morning in Malaysia. You know, you never know where it's going to listen to, which I'm sure you can agree. It's been interesting to have a global reach, right? To kind of see these random little countries I never heard of pop up on my radar and I'm like, I didn't even know that country existed.

And there's someone there listening to my show. It's it's definitely an interesting experience and I think like you said, for anyone listening who wants to start a podcast or is just starting one, it is a. Whatever is longer than a marathon, you know, it's like five marathons, you know, it's like a lifelong marathon.

Yeah. It's, it's funny because people who give financial advice tell people to take a long-term view. So there's a natural first derivative. Thought process in terms of if you're giving advice and telling your clients to take a long-term view for their investments horizon, and this is gonna be the remainder of your lifetime, you might even be leaving a legacy for your children or grandchildren, and so it might even be beyond your lifetime.

Similarly, taking a long-term time horizon when getting a podcast to get some traction. It's a very analogous way of looking at things. And so if nothing else, at least I have the proper disposition because it's what I've been preaching throughout my entire career. Right? But most people are what I would call day traders, hidden gamblers.

You know, when it comes to podcasting and social media. They just want that instant gratification. The all right, here it is in one day. So, yeah. And just speaking of broad versus intimate knowledge. When we were discussing off the microphone what we wanted to talk about, you mentioned the five psychological vices that keep most people repeating bad wealth decisions and how to overcome them.

And I felt like that was great because of its broad reach where people could say, Hey, you know, maybe I have some of these, and they could start work on that or. As I'm sure you know, people want to reach out to you one-on-one or take a deeper dive into it. So let's get into those five psychological vices and honestly how you discover them.

I'm sure it wasn't overnight, you know, you just woke up and you said, wow. Five. Perfectly. Yeah. Aligned, you know, devices, tell you what I, I, I say five because, you know, I could do three and I could do eight. Like, it is basically where do you stop? Where do you draw the line, right? So there are a whole bunch of things.

So I'll start with one, which is fairly obvious and that is not really being time sensitive given where we are, what we've been talking about. A lot of people think, oh, I'm gonna save for retirement. I'll do that. After I've got my house and I've got my spouse and my children are born. But by the time you've all got all that under control, you're maybe 45.

And if you could have started even very modestly when you were 25, you would if you're even earning a little bit in saving even a modest amount, you could be, you know, six digits. You could already have over a hundred thousand dollars saved up if you'd have started earlier and just adjusted your lifestyle and started thinking about, that day down the road. And it's very difficult for people to imagine themselves when they're 65 or 70 and retired when they're only 25 or 30 and just starting out in their career. But you know, everyone, most people live to be that age and then some and you have to think about that tomorrow. So.

The, the first thing that I think people don't really appreciate is that it's time in the market, not timing the market. That is important. And if you can start early, that is something that yeah, you can always start, and it's never too late to start, but there's an old saying in finance that the best time to plant an oak tree was 20 years ago, and the second best time is today.

So it's the same sort of thing with saving for retirement. The best time is, you know, as soon as you are earning money and you can save a little bit of the money that you have, you should start saving it for that later date. But to overcome that, you need to have an appreciation for the fact that you're gonna live.

Most people these days live to be 85 or 90. And it's not uncommon. A lot of people are saying that a lot of children born now will live to be a hundred or more. And you know, a lot of people don't get their head around that. They'll say, well, my mom, I died when I was, she was 71. And my, you know, my dad was, was 68 and he had a heart attack.

And, and so I'm assuming that I'm gonna die when I'm in my late sixties or in my seventies, when in fact, if you're taking care of yourself and, and, you know, getting some getting some fresh air and exercising and getting a good night's sleep, there's no reason why you couldn't live 10 or 20 years longer than your parents did.

And a lot of people don't realize that if you're gonna live that much longer, you need to save that much more in order to maintain your lifestyle for that much longer. That's a, that's a first derivative line of thinking. That's, it's obvious when you say it, but a lot of people, if you don't tell 'em flat out, you know, however much you think you need to save for retirement, you probably need to save more because you're probably gonna live longer than you think.

And if you start later, it's even harder. So now, instead of starting at 25 and saving till you're 65 and living to being living to being 75, which is what you're planning, now you're starting at 35 or 40 and you're retiring at 65, but you're living to be 85. Well, now wait a minute. You're, you're saving 10 or 15 years less and you're living five or 10 or 15 years longer in retirement.

You know, whatever you thought you were gonna need, you're gonna need a whole lot more in order to make that all work. For sure. I actually would apply the same analogy to working out with the best time was 20 years ago, but the second best time is today 'cause so many people. Push off and I think that it applies to a lot of things and I think, that we're retirement, especially with, I'm not a financial expert, but with so many things changing in the government, I think you should plan to have to provide for yourself.

Right. And then if there are other options for when you're a certain age that can help pay for stuff or help make an income, then take that. But you should plan to be on your own first. I think that's probably the best mindset to have. That way if all else fails, you can take care of yourself. And then, hey, if there's other options and extra income, then that's great, but that should be, so to speak, the icing on the cake, not the cake itself, you know?

Yeah, agree. So can I get into a second one for sure. Okay. So, there are a lot of biases. We're humans and humans all have biases. We're all biased. You're biased, I'm biased. We don't like to admit it. And I think actually being able to admit it is actually the first step in actually helping to overcome your biases so that you can keep them in check.

But the best you can do is try to manage them and be aware of them. You can't eliminate them completely. So the second thing that I want to talk about is something called recency bias. And recency bias is when you make a decision based on whatever's happened recently, and you just assume that what you're experiencing now or what you're likely to experience in the near future will look a whole lot like what you just experienced in the past month or past year.

So, as an example, we've had a very good run in the stock market in 2024 and 2025. In fact in 2023 as well. So now we're at two and three quarters years of stock markets doing really well. And a lot of people will say, oh stock market's been getting, pick a number, 20%. It's been making 20% a year for the past few years.

And then they start thinking that, oh, well that means it's gonna make 20% a year every year for the rest of my life. Well, actually no. Expected the historical return for the stock market is actually less than 10%, and there's this thing called regression to the means that when you have a few good years where you get over 20, if the long-term average is less than 10, it wouldn't be surprising if you had a 2, 3, 4 year run where the returns were zero.

And a lot of people. They would say, what? Well, that, that, that can't be, yes it can. In fact, you should expect it, but people don't expect it because the recent past has been so good. They just assume. They just assume that their recent future will be more like what they've just experienced and things are not gonna change.

And they do change. And you need to be aware of that and invest accordingly and think about how things might change. And that's not just. For investing, that's for your relationship with your partner. That's for the way you raise your children. That's for what's going well and not well at work.

You know, a lot of things that are going really well. Hopefully they'll continue to go well, but certainly with regard to capital markets, the trees do not go to the sky when things are going really, really well. That usually means they're ready for a pullback, and you should be aware of that.

Right. And historically we've seen the stock market do so sometimes in a terrible way, you know, so. Right. I agree. That people get into these comfortable patterns and forget that life is I kind of follow the opposite principle, which is, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. If you're familiar with that rule. Yeah. So that's, that's called Murphy's Law. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, I'll tell you another thing since we're talking about laws for a moment, and we talked earlier about misinformation and disinformation.

One of the things that I talk about is. Something called Brand's Law. This is a meme that has been on the internet now for 14 or 15 years. There's this Italian engineer who says that the amount of energy required to refute BS is an order of magnitude larger than the amount of energy required to put the BS out into the public domain in the first place.

So it's hard. Once, once an idea takes hold, it's, it's hard to get people to. To fact check and to correct their own thinking. Mark Twain had a similar quote. You know, Twain Twain lived whatever, 150 or 160 years ago, but he said it's easier to fool a man than it is to convince him he's been fooled.

So a lot of people have been fooled. But of course, no one likes to be fooled so you can fool them because oftentimes you fool them by telling them a happy story, and that makes 'em feel good and that just makes them open their wallets and open their checkbook and fall for a scam or whatever else.

But then when you point out after the fact, so here's where you didn't check the, the actual email that you transferred that money to see that's a fake account. Or, you know, see that, see that's a scam. And people really, really don't like it when you point out to them that they've been taken because no one likes to be taken.

And it's almost like they would rather not know because when you point it out to them, they become offended, live in denial kind of mentality. And they're ashamed of themselves. Right. But it's easier to fool people than it is to convince 'em. They've been fooled a hundred percent.  

They wanna live in denial. Right. And I get that. And I think also this mentality too you talked about it takes more energy because if you and I comment on a page that's putting out false information, well, a bunch of those followers who believe it or support that person for whatever reason, probably biased reasons, they're all gonna gang up on you and I and they're gonna be like, no, no, no.

I agree. I agree. And now you got five people. Who all agree on this false information now against one person trying to speak the truth. And so, that power in numbers misinformation in numbers I should say, you know, so that's unfortunate truth. Sure. That brings, actually brings up another risk, which is called herding.

So, it's, it's, we're all like sheep. We're all like cattle. You ever see on the, like if you ever watch like a wild kingdom where you see a herd of antelopes that are all running in one direction, out of, out of nowhere, they all dart and do a 90 degree turn or swallows that do these different things.

Yeah. So people do that too. And oftentimes we're social creatures that it's based on social psychology. Everyone wants to fit in. And so if you're at the office and you're talking to your peers at the water cooler and they're all doing this, they're all buying this kind of car or this kind of sneaker or whatever else, you're going to follow along and do that.

And again, it's not necessarily wrong, but it is also dangerous because what you're doing is you're parking your critical thinking. You're focusing more on fitting in with your peer group than you are in making an independent informed decision based on evidence that's right for your circumstances. So it's dangerous, it's not necessarily wrong, but it's a risk that you need to be mindful of.

I think a lot of people, whenever they're making any kind of a decision, would be well advised to step back and say, okay, well wait a minute. First principles, what are we trying to accomplish here? Am I trying to reach my retirement goal as a for instance or save for my daughter's education?

Okay, well, how old's my daughter? Oh, she's three. Okay, well, that means it's gonna be another 14 or 15 years before she starts, so that's the time horizon. Now, what could go right? What could go wrong? Do I wanna put all the money into just one thing or will I diversify? And stopping and thinking about what to do will usually lead to a better decision.

But if everyone at the office is putting their child's college fund into X, y you know, whatever investment then you might, sometimes you think there's safety in numbers, but. The children that are putting their money into the college fund might have children that are 16 and 17 and they're taking the money out in a year or two.

And so they might be a little more conservative in what they're investing in because their time horizon is shorter, whereas right for you and your child, you've got a 15 year time horizon. And that one difference in terms of the life circumstance could lead to a very different decision as to what's most appropriate for what you need to be doing.

I think this ties very well into our earlier conversation on social media. Right? Because I'll give an example. I'm the kind of guy, I'm not gonna spend a lot of money on a car unless I'm buying, a car for my family for the next however many years. Right? But in general, if you just need to get point A to B

I'm not a huge car guy. But there are plenty of influencers out there telling you that you need to buy a nice car. For example, you need a Bugatti, right? But most realistically, you don't need one I think there's a lot of trends being pushed. Like you mentioned, I don't believe in spending too much money on clothes either, but there's a lot of people saying, you need these designer belts, these designer bags, designer things, which aren't even that good looking, but because of their name brand being spread on the internet and popularized by celebrities, now you're gonna spend.

You know, $120 on a belt or $600 on a pair of sneakers or whatever it may be, right? Or a special jacket, sometimes on a shirt that just has a single word printed across the front of it, right? So luckily I've never been in that mentality of, oh, I need this designer stuff where I need this type of car and stuff.

But a lot of people are, a lot of people who follow their influencers and their influencers are saying, Hey. You need to really buy or invest in this stock, or this company or this energy drink or these types of clothing and it's not just the internet, like you said, it might just be at your workplace culture.

I've seen it even at, restaurants a few people were like, oh, you gotta try this new item. And then so everyone orders it and you don't even like the thing, you just wanna be, you don't wanna be the only person at the table who doesn't have the cheesy tater tots. Right. You know, like, well, yeah, I've seen why not order one or two in a bunch of extra forks so everyone can try it.

And then, and then you don't, you're not committed. You don't have to, you know, use your entire food budget. But again, it's so important. We're all humans. Humans just wanna get along. You wanna fit in, and if everyone else is ordering the tater tots, you just go, oh, what the heck out? You know, it's like, I don't even like tater tots, but you know, there is.

Yeah. Well, and part of that is we need to respect people's financial decisions more than the aesthetic. So if my friend cheaps out on a car, you know, part of that is me not shaming or judging him for getting a cheap car, then next time he has to buy an, he thinks he has to buy an expensive one. Otherwise me and other people are gonna shame him.

I think there's a lot of. Stigmas around what we buy and spend our money on, and people. Yeah. Like even if you're tight on a budget and you just bought a house for your wife and you got a kid on the way. So you go to Goodwill or a thrift store to get all your furniture and then all your neighbors kinda are like, look at this janky furniture, you know?

Yeah. But for you right now, that's what you can afford. And you need to save the money 'cause you got a kid on the way. But unfortunately, like you said, there's a lot of, yeah. Hurting so. Right. Yeah. And it reveals preferences and priorities. You know the way you spend your money reveals a lot about who you are, what's important to you.

I'm like you. I think a car is a transportation appliance that gets you from A to B and back. Again, I don't use it as a status symbol unfortunately for my line of work. I had. I had an 11-year-old Hyundai, and my wife just asked me to trade it in. So about a year ago we sold it and bought a new Lexus.

So I've got a nice new fancy car with a vanity license plate and everything else. But believe me, it was the sort of thing where she's a lawyer, I'm a portfolio manager. And it was starting to be a bit awkward because we're not car people, but people were looking at us as we would drive up to social events or, you know, whatever.

And people would go, well, what are you doing driving this? I fully intend to drive this car for the next decade. It's the sort of thing that it, you're gonna get a car even if it's a, even if it's a nice car. You don't have to trade it in every three or four years. You can drive it until it no longer works.

So yeah, there are lots of things where you have to be comfortable in your own skin. And talking about what you were saying the other day, a moment ago about suicide prevention and mental health. If you can be comfortable in who you are, and if you can be comfortable buying clothes in a thrift store and not giving into societal expectations, it's probably gonna serve you pretty well in terms of your mental health as well, because as soon as you start associating your worth with.

The stuff you own or the clothes you wear or the car you drive as opposed to who you are inside. It's going to reflect on your mental health and it will probably manifest in some very harmful ways. I 100% agree. I did a whole episode yesterday on. Chasing after love, feeling like you have to earn it, not that it's given and placing your worth in your actions.

And we talked about burnout with a lot of people becoming workaholics because they tie their worth to degrees or even in this conversation, some people tie their work to how much money they make. You know, some people end up chasing money because they think it's what they are.

And I had a guy come on the show, he goes, you know, I was in my young twenties, I opened up a pay stub for $110,000, at the end of the year. And I was, I felt great for all of five seconds. And then. I looked around, everything was the same. That's still, you know, still alone, still the social life.

I spent almost a whole year traveling on the road, living in janky hotels, going from one place to the other. He goes, nothing changed. So, you know, I've had plenty of episodes of my show about where chasing money will lead you and, making it your worth rather than everything else. Chase, chase happiness and chase purpose.

If, if you can, if you have a purpose in life. There's, there's an old saying that the, the purpose in life is a life of purpose. If you have a reason to get up in the morning, and that can be a spouse and or children but it can be your career, it can be an advocation, helping people through your podcast, whatever.

You're likely to be better adjusted and, and healthier and happier, and, and that's really great. A hundred percent. So let's get into the last two vices here, and by last two, I mean the last two we'll go over on this episode. If you want more vices, reach out to Mr. Dei on your, your own time or I'll have him back on the show if everyone's like, we need more, we need more dei.

Okay. Okay. I, the next one that I wanna talk about is one that I talk about perhaps the most in my book Bullshit. And that's optimism bias. So. Look, I'm an optimist. It's pretty clear to me that you're an optimist and optimism is a good thing, and it works out really, really well. 19 times out of 20.

But there are instances where optimism can get you into trouble if you're not being careful and you're being cavalier and so forth. So let me give you a specific example of what optimism bias is so that you understand. Most people know. That throughout North America and Western Europe and developed countries, the divorce rate is somewhere between 40 and 50%.

Most people know that that's about the, like the likelihood of anybody getting divorced, getting married today ending up in divorce. If you ask a couple on their wedding day, what about you? Will you divorce? And every one of 'em says, well, well, no, not me. Uh uh yeah. 40 to 50% of people divorce. Sure, I understand.

Those are the statistics. But not me. I, I, that's, I'm not gonna be one of those. Well, what you have to realize, of course, is that yeah, you are those are the numbers. And no matter what you think you're gonna experience, you're part of that data set and you're just as likely as anyone else to get divorced.

That 40 to 50%, I, I got divorced once. I didn't think I was gonna get divorced. But I've suffered from optimism bias. So optimism bias is when you say, I understand that bad things are gonna happen, but for whatever reason, I don't think they're gonna happen to me personally. Hmm. And, and so that's optimism bias, and that's a risk that you have to worry about in investing and in life because it's, as we've seen, it's important when you choose a life partner.

It's important when you start a business, you know, I'm gonna, I understand that X percent of restaurants fail, but I'm gonna start a restaurant and mine's not gonna fail. Well. It might and it might not, I don't know. But don't think that you're special because everyone else that started a restaurant knew the risks as well.

Right. And a whole bunch of them ended up failing as well. Right. So the thing about optimism bias is that, look, it's good to be optimistic. People wouldn't take risks. We wouldn't make progress as a society if we didn't have optimists and didn't take risks. So they're generally a good thing. Be realistic.

Do it with your eyes open and you're not special. You know, whatever the odds are, those odds apply to you too. And a lot of people don't really, they don't wanna come to terms with that. That fact, I understand why, of course. Especially in terms of being a young brand, new business owner wanting to believe in success.

And I get the mindset you're coming from and I think the same sometimes goes into the stock market as well.

Okay. So I've got one more, you asked for five. So I'll give you a fifth one. There's this bias research called prospect theory. So I'm gonna give you a bit of an academic bit of background, but I think it's useful. There's this guy named Daniel Kahneman. He he died about a year ago.

He was a professor at Princeton. He died in his nineties, but he did research with his research partner, Amos Ky, on something that became known as Prospect Theory. And, and so he wrote a an international bestseller 10 or 15 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, called Thinking Fast and Slow, New York Times Bestseller, and he was a Nobel Prize winner.

And what he anderski found in their research, which has now become called Prospect Theory, is that people's views with regard to risk change, depending on how things are going, and they are normally measured and they understand that risk and reward are related and they're prepared to take a little more risk in order to try to get a bit more reward.

And things may or may not work out. But if things are going down a certain path and they're not doing as well as they would. Expect they oftentimes become risk seeking because they actually want to try to avoid the loss, and so they will take more risk in order to avoid the loss. Hmm. And that's ironic because what Kahneman found was that in the end, investors feel the pain of a loss.

Twice as acutely as they feel the joy of a game. So in most instances, in most asset classes, as your time horizon expands, markets go up. And so we expect them to go up. And so when they go up, we don't get too excited 'cause that's more or less what we expect. But when we encounter something that's not in line with our expectations, when things go down or they go down more than we expect, or they stay down longer than we think they ought to or might.

Then we really, really feel that pain. So the pain of a loss is twice as acute as the joy of a gain, and that's something that you should be aware of. And, filter that, use that as a filter when you make your investing decisions, basically, you know, do I have the stomach? It's my, the stock market again, it's gone up whatever, 25% a year.

For the past three years I started with a hundred thousand dollars. I now have $190,000. Look at me, aren't I wonderful? Great. But now you use that as a, as an anchor. Now that you're at 190, you expect that you're always gonna be at 190 or higher. You're never gonna go lower. If you drop down to 135. You're gonna be pretty annoyed.

And if you're still down at 135 in 2027, you're gonna be even more annoyed. And it's the sort of thing where the, the phrases you win by not losing. And if you can avoid big losses, chances are you'll do a better job of staying the course and staying invested and taking a long-term perspective. People bail when things don't go the way they expect.

That means having better expectations and being able to deal with bad news when it comes. 'cause it always comes eventually. I don't know when, I don't know why, I don't know how long it's gonna last, but markets do not go up at a straight line and you need to know that. Right. And you need to be prepared for sure.

I totally get that. So. Five psychological advice destroying our ability to make good financial decisions. Obviously there are a lot more. You have a whole podcast dedicated to it. So ladies and gentlemen, we're gonna have the podcast and description below for y'all to check out more, but also Mr.

Degus and information. So if you want to just connect with him one-on-one again, can you tell us a little bit about working with you? Sure. So my personal website is john dey.ca. Dot ca is important. Dey is spelled D-E-G-O-E-Y and my podcast and my YouTube channel is called Make Better Wealth Decisions.

So Make Better Wealth Decisions is available on YouTube, but it's also available on Apple, iTunes and Spotify and, you know, all major platforms. I don't have many clients in the us but I do have clients in other parts of the world and all throughout Canada. So, it's one of those things where I help people.

The podcast doubles as a value proposition, so the podcast is called Make Better Wealth Decisions, and that's what I help people do every day. I help people think about these biases, plan accordingly, integrate their taxes, plan for their future and all of those things. And so I'm a bit of an educator at heart, but I'm also a money coach.

But I think it's worth saying I'm also a behavioral coach. I'm actually helping people understand what these biases are and make decisions that are purposeful in light of these biases. And again, you can't eliminate them. All you can do is be aware of them and manage them. Right, right, right.

So, I wanna thank you for coming on the show today to share that. Like I said in the beginning, every single day we're making decisions about our finances both passively and actively. So ladies and gentlemen, if you take anything away from this episode, take a step back today. Look at everything if we haven't already, and just kind of reflect on what we said and think about if anything we said today maybe is active in your life, what can you do to manage it so that it's not making terrible health decisions in your life?

But Mr. De, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Appreciate it. My pleasure.