The Fine Art of Financial Foot-Dragging
by SGL Financial
Our 2 Cents – Episode #272
The Fine Art of Financial Foot-Dragging
There’s no shortage of financial headlines to unpack this week on Our 2 Cents! Steve and Gabriel dive into the latest tech market developments, analyze the midterms’ market implications, and expose how procrastination might be compromising your financial goals. Don’t put off listening this week, stream the episode now and get your finances moving!
- Market Brief:
- Tech stocks are feeling the heat. What happens when Big Tech’s biggest money-makers start losing steam?
- Midterms and Your Finances:
- Midterms are making headlines, but what could they mean for your wallet? Here are some questions worth exploring.
- Gabriel’s Quick Hits:
- Should peanuts be part of your daily routine? New research offers some interesting insight.
- Upgrade your passport, not your phone. Check out the exotic destinations you can travel to for less than the price of the latest iPhone!
- How “Someday” Costs You Today:
- Sometimes the hardest financial decision is simply making one. Here’s why overthinking can cost you and how to break the cycle.
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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: Well, welcome everybody to Our Two Cents. You’ve got Gabriel Lewit and Steven Lewit here. We were warming up with some tongue twisters before the show.
Steve Lewit: No, no, no. You’re going to sing the song.
Gabriel Lewit: Oh no, I’m not.
Steve Lewit: No, yes, you are.
Gabriel Lewit: No, it was just for warmup. We were having a good time here.
Steve Lewit: You’ve got to sing the song.
Gabriel Lewit: Somehow, we got onto the book Ticky Ticky Tembo if you’ve never read it. It’s a kid’s book.
Steve Lewit: It’s a fish catch…
Gabriel Lewit: And Steve says he made up a song as a kid.
Steve Lewit: Not a song, a way of choosing.
Gabriel Lewit: Itsy bitsy…
Steve Lewit: No, Ienimini Ipsatini.
Gabriel Lewit: Okay. Yes.
Steve Lewit: I’ll say mine if you say yours.
Gabriel Lewit: If anybody else in the world has heard of what you just said.
Steve Lewit: All right. I’ll do mine…
Gabriel Lewit: I would like an email.
Steve Lewit: Okay. So folks, you know how to choose… This is the way to choose if you’re born in the South Bronx when you’re a kid.
Gabriel Lewit: You’re not going to actually do it?
Steve Lewit: Of course.
Gabriel Lewit: Well, go for it.
Steve Lewit: Okay. Here’s how you choose. You say, “Ienimini ipsatini, ababambalini, achikachi bumbalachi, out goes Y-O-U. And that’s how you do it.
Gabriel Lewit: Are you moving your fingers and pointing at different people while you’re doing this?
Steve Lewit: Yeah. So like the four of us here.
Gabriel Lewit: It’s like eeny, meeny, miny, moe.
Steve Lewit: Like eeny, meeny, miny, moe, but a lot more interesting than eeny mini mini mo, catch a tiger by its toe.
Gabriel Lewit: Itsy bitsy bumbolini. What was it?
Steve Lewit: Ienimini ipsatini, ababambalini, achikachi bumbalachi, out goes Y-O-U.
Gabriel Lewit: Yes. Hey.
Steve Lewit: And then you do it again.
Gabriel Lewit: I think if you’re smart enough about eeny, meeny, miny, moe, you know exactly how many people you have, which one you start with to get to the one you want.
Steve Lewit: You’re avoiding the song. Let’s hear it. Come on.
Gabriel Lewit: I don’t have a song.
Steve Lewit: You had the song about…
Gabriel Lewit: No, I had a Ticky Ticky Tembo.
Steve Lewit: Some fish that had eyes that you didn’t eat that or something like
Gabriel Lewit: That. No, it was a children’s song. It was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, once I caught a fish alive. And then 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, then I threw it back again.
Steve Lewit: And then?
Gabriel Lewit: Oh, that was it.
Steve Lewit: Oh, you’ve got to start all over.
Gabriel Lewit: I sang it though, but I didn’t sing it on the show here.
Steve Lewit: But you’ve got to start all over. There was a part that said, “And then I started all over again.”
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah, yeah. Well, next time, maybe for the next show.
Steve Lewit: My son has no courage.
Gabriel Lewit: Well, we hope you’re doing well. It is election day as we record this.
Steve Lewit: Yeah. I got to go vote. You voted.
Gabriel Lewit: I did. I’ve got my sticker here.
Steve Lewit: Yep.
Gabriel Lewit: So hopefully you get out there and give democracy a whirl. Go and vote for whoever is important for you.
Steve Lewit: Very important.
Gabriel Lewit: It is indeed very important. And in fact, we have some topics today. We’re going to talk a bit about what do the midterms mean when it comes to various things here in the finance and economy and the country. We’ll just touch upon that here momentarily. Steve wants to talk about procrastination when it comes to your finances.
Steve Lewit: I do.
Gabriel Lewit: But we’re going to wait to talk about that later.
Steve Lewit: Maybe on the next show.
Gabriel Lewit: I had to do it.
Steve Lewit: You did.
Gabriel Lewit: I did. Okay.
Steve Lewit: Yeah.
Gabriel Lewit: Anyway, so we’ve got a lot here lined up for you and we’re going to go right ahead and dig on in. Now to start things off here, actually we have a market brief. If you weren’t paying attention and many people maybe weren’t, Amazon, Apple, some of the big tech companies last week had a pretty tough week. So tech stocks sold off rather sharply and Alphabet had one of their worst days for trading in history.
Steve Lewit: I think the number…
Gabriel Lewit: 12%.
Steve Lewit: Realize how big they are. That 12% loss represented $500 billion in market cap. That’s like mind-blowing.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. So 12% for Google Alphabet is really, really a big drop. And what it really prompted was some renewed concern about the direction that AI is headed from a financial perspective, not so much will it be used in the world because it’s here, it’s going to stay. I was talking with one of our team members the other day about AI and we were talking about where we think it may be headed. And I do think it’s going to of course be here to stay, but the question is will the revenues catch up to the capital expenditures, the obscene amount of capital expenditures going into building out AI. And that’s I think where some of the concerns here with Alphabet and some of the other big tech players are because the revenues were a little bit disappointing and that caused a big drop in the stock price.
Steve Lewit: Especially the Alphabet’s. And so their platform has lagged behind. I don’t understand all of this, but just reading it from a high level point of view, their tech has lagged behind OpenAI and Anthropic and all of those and they lost some revenue and the stock went down. Now the real question is, Gabriel, as to your point is when do we see a return on all these investments? And that is the question that everybody is asking more and more often, especially when interest rates went up a little bit because borrowing money becomes even more expensive and there’s nothing to see for all of that.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. Let me read this here. Alphabet burned through more than $9 billion in cash last quarter as capital expenditures more than doubled to $51.4 billion. And before this year, Alphabet had never in its history as a public company reported negative quarterly free cash flow. And it has now posted two consecutive quarters of negative cash flow with analysts thinking it’ll stay negative through 2028, similar with Amazon suffering a similar fate. So that’s really that big question is when will the cash flow… If companies lose money temporarily, that may not be a bad thing if they’re building out something bigger and bigger that will generate more profits. But if companies consistently lose money for too long, people start to question rightfully, where is this headed? Is this still a good investment? Is it worth what we’re paying for it as a stock price? And if not, that stock price can be substantially dropped like we saw here recently last week.
Steve Lewit: Yeah, exactly. When tech companies, look, tech companies always run negative cash flow for quite some time.
Gabriel Lewit: Many of them, yeah.
Steve Lewit: Many of them do, but there’s a revenue model that is behind those investments. We’re going to make this chip. It’s going to take us five years, but when we make it, this is what it’s going to sell for. This is what the projected sales are going to look like. With AI, there is little or none of that. It’s just that this is great and it’s going to do all of these things. Let’s just keep investing in it.
Gabriel Lewit: Well, and the interesting thing is Alphabet or Google’s biggest revenue driver is ads…
Steve Lewit: Is advertising.
Gabriel Lewit: On Google. And many people are now electing to skip Google and go to… I do a lot more searching now on ChatGPT than I ever use Google at the moment.
Steve Lewit: I do too. Yeah.
Gabriel Lewit: Okay. In recent months. A lot of other people, millions of other people are doing the same. I’ll tell you though, what’s interesting is typically if I’m on a Google search page and the first few results are sponsored, that doesn’t bother me. I just scroll past them or sometimes they’re really accurate. With ChatGPT though, it’s meant to be more like a conversation. If all of a sudden that thing just starts popping up with ads everywhere…
Steve Lewit: And Gabriel…
Gabriel Lewit: It’s going to be really bothersome.
Steve Lewit: There is a version of ChatGPT that has ads in it now. So if you don’t go elect to the premier version… So I have the premier version and I didn’t log in and I was using just chat and I’m getting ads on it. I said, “What is this?” Because I like chat because it doesn’t have ads on it. So it said you got to sign up for the premier version. So I went to sign up because I didn’t know I had it and it says the premier version is no longer available, which is kind of a catch 22. And then I found out that I had it, so I sign in all the time now. But they’re smart. They’re going to start seeing ads there too.
Gabriel Lewit: Well, yeah. Again, the challenge there is then as everything seems to be in this world switching to paid subscription models that has its own challenges versus companies paying people like Google who don’t have paid subscription models where people are just going there and clicking and typing things. There’s just a lot of fundamental shifting that this could be leading towards that makes us all really uncertain.
Steve Lewit: Yeah. And that’s uncertainty is what drives prices down on stocks. It reaches a, well, shall I say, a boiling point. All of a sudden… And it’s amazing because everybody kind of reacts to everybody else and all of a sudden the stock is down 12%.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. So where is this headed? We don’t know, but it was interesting enough to merit a quick discussion here today. And certainly if you have questions on that or what that might mean, you can give us a call. But the general gist of it is make sure you don’t have too much concentration in any single individual stock.
Steve Lewit: Yeah, that’s the real point.
Gabriel Lewit: I think would be my key takeaway, unless you are purposely doing that knowing that it’s a high risk, high reward situation. If you’re overly exposed and you’re not aware of it or you’re not ready for that potential risk, that’s where it could catch you off guards.
Steve Lewit: Agreed. I wasn’t going to say anything other than agreed.
Gabriel Lewit: Well, thank you. Thank you, Steve.
Steve Lewit: You’re welcome.
Gabriel Lewit: You’re welcome. All right. 2026 midterms.
Steve Lewit: Wow.
Gabriel Lewit: We are there.
Steve Lewit: I can’t wait for tonight.
Gabriel Lewit: We are there.
Steve Lewit: I’m so curious of what’s going to happen.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. I mean, it’s been talked about all year. It’s finally here today. Today is actually the day we’re recording this. And there’s some common questions anytime there’s an election. The most common is what will this do to the stock market? And of course, Steve, to very quickly answer that, what’s the most common answer?
Steve Lewit: Let me see. I don’t know. I have no idea.
Gabriel Lewit: Well, that is the answer. Nobody really knows.
Steve Lewit: Historically, I believe that the market has gone up more than it’s gone down after midterms.
Gabriel Lewit: You would be correct. Historical data suggests that markets may tend to outperform in the 12 months following midterm elections.
Steve Lewit: Yeah. May 10 means folks, we don’t know.
Gabriel Lewit: Is that not a guarantee?
Steve Lewit: May 10.
Gabriel Lewit: May 10 too. Yes. So there is no direct one-to-one correlation. If that’s what you’re looking for, I apologize in advance. There is no quick clear cut answer. Yes, midterms markets go up by now type stock signal, but it’s definitely something where it could depend on so many different factors, and we’re going to talk about a few of those here in the spirit of the midterm elections here today.
Steve Lewit: Okay.
Gabriel Lewit: So, number one, let’s see here. We’ve got which party will have control after the midterms is always one of those big questions, okay. Will it stay Republicans in control? Will it be Democrats in control? And then what will the changes on policy, legislation, taxes, all the other things that can go connected with this? That’s right there very hard to predict, right? We’ll know, of course, in about 24 hours, but until that point, it’s near impossible to know exactly how this will all shake out.
Steve Lewit: Well, you could read the polls. All the polls say 94% chance that the Dems will take over the House, 54% chance that the Dems will take over the Senate. But those are polls and that’s not reality.
Gabriel Lewit: I think the last polls had the Democrats winning the election.
Steve Lewit: They did, yeah.
Gabriel Lewit: Which didn’t work out.
Steve Lewit: Not too well for them. Yeah. But here’s the thing. You know that a Democratic administration is going to have more controls, more hurdles for businesses to jump through, and that always affects profitability and if you affect profitability, then you affect the stock market. So if the Democrats do take control, you might say, “Well, I think things are going to get tighter. All of these restrictions that have been eliminated, many of them may come back and maybe I’ll hedge a little bit and de-risk my portfolio a little.”
Gabriel Lewit: Maybe, but that’s one of the things on the watch list here. In more specifics, there are regulatory changes, right? So there’s a lot of legislation that could impact, as you were just talking about, regulations. Another one would be, will there be changes to tax reform? So there’s a lot of curiosity where taxes are going to head to in the future with deficits and with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, OBBBA that was passed.
Steve Lewit: You got it.
Gabriel Lewit: OB3A passed last year.
Steve Lewit: Yeah, and it’s not only taxes.
Gabriel Lewit: Tax brackets. Will they stay low? Will they get higher in the near future?
Steve Lewit: It’s not only tax brackets, but what happens to estate taxes? Federal estate, what happens to the step-up in basis? What happens to social security?
Gabriel Lewit: That’s another, not directly tax related, but definitely has a tax component to it.
Steve Lewit: Yep.
Gabriel Lewit: Tons of questions about that. It is being discussed a lot more frequently in the news in legislations these days or proposed legislations. So there will hopefully be a solution one way or the other to the social security challenges that are currently being faced right now. And then there’s also questions around healthcare, right? And these are all the typical big hot button issues that voters tend to vote based upon, right? There’s taxes, there’s legislation, there’s healthcare, there’s international affairs, there’s all these various things. And going back to where we started, all of these could impact the stock market in various ways that are very much impossible to predict.
Steve Lewit: Absolutely. And look, what are voters looking for? Most voters are looking for an end. Well, I’d say most. I don’t know this. I’m not a poll person, but I imagine most people want an end to the war. They want oil prices to come down. They want inflation to come down. They want to go to the supermarket and not worry about every dime they spend there. And so does that take effect with a change of control? Is there any way of that happening so that the economy is healthier? You know what’s interesting about what I just said? The economy actually is pretty healthy.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah, I was just going to say that.
Steve Lewit: Yeah. So I kind of contradicted myself. The economy is healthy. It’s people that are having a difficult time.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. Yeah. Cost of living is high, right? That’s one of those other topics. So all this remains to be seen. We don’t want to spend too much time on this today because we just don’t know. And by the time you’re listening to this, you will know, which will be interesting to see. So more to come on that. Of course, as the legislation progresses, as new laws are passed, as new bills are proposed, we will be here to let you know of what those might be and how they may impact you. And of course, we’ll keep track and tabs of the stock market regularly and let you know the best tips and strategies to take on that front too.
Steve Lewit: But of course, that’s what we do.
Gabriel Lewit: Yes. And now for a lighthearted interlude, to space things up a little bit.
Steve Lewit: I could use a good laugh.
Gabriel Lewit: All right. Well, we had a topic here that you picked out.
Steve Lewit: Yes.
Gabriel Lewit: And I think you picked it out because you know that I actually have in my desk drawer, a tin full of peanuts.
Steve Lewit: A couple of tins.
Gabriel Lewit: A couple of tins.
Steve Lewit: Full of peanuts.
Gabriel Lewit: That I special order.
Steve Lewit: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Gabriel Lewit: They’re from Virginia.
Steve Lewit: Really?
Gabriel Lewit: And they’re extra toasted, extra roasted. Very, very… They got a nice crunch. And the study that you found here says that scientists discovered a surprising brain benefit of eating peanuts every single day.
Steve Lewit: Yeah, which explains you.
Gabriel Lewit: I think it answers all the questions.
Steve Lewit: This is why you are the way you are.
Gabriel Lewit: Okay. A surprising new study. This was as of November 1st, 2026, hot off the presses.
Steve Lewit: The day before yesterday.
Gabriel Lewit: Now the source is the Peanut Institute. You found this, by the way.
Steve Lewit: I didn’t know there was a Peanut Institute.
Gabriel Lewit: Well, I didn’t either. What study… They’re not going to announce one.
Steve Lewit: There’s an institute for everything else.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. It says, “Eating peanuts every day could help support brain health and memory in older adults.”
Steve Lewit: I’m going to run out and give Virginia peanuts.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. So found that consuming about two servings of unsalted skin roasted peanuts daily for 16 weeks improved insulin responsiveness in brain regions, important for memory, which is a function that often weakens with age and has been linked to Alzheimer’s disease. So I’m self-protecting myself here.
Steve Lewit: Yeah, I can see the…
Gabriel Lewit: From the future adverse effects.
Steve Lewit: Protective shield building around your brain. But yours are salted, aren’t they? I tasted yours. They’re salted.
Gabriel Lewit: There is a little bit of salt on them. Yeah. Yeah. But anyways, now you know.
Steve Lewit: And folks, if you would like to know the brand of Gabriel’s peanuts, what’s the phone number? What’s the contact?
Gabriel Lewit: Oh, you could email us, info@sglfinancial.com. Happy to share.
Steve Lewit: Happy to share.
Gabriel Lewit: But yeah, they’re quite good. Better than the planter’s ones you get at the store, which are also quite good.
Steve Lewit: They’re good. But yours, folks, seriously, I had a handful of Gabriel’s peanuts. Not only did my intelligence and IQ level go up three points, but they really tasted well.
Gabriel Lewit: It might have been four points.
Steve Lewit: Might have been four, but they really tasted good too.
Gabriel Lewit: Yes. Okay. Your next lighthearted interlude topic here, because we were on deep philosophical things like midterm elections, would be five international destinations that cost less than a new iPhone.
Steve Lewit: Where did you find this?
Gabriel Lewit: Well, Apple’s top tier iPhone duo with two terabytes of storage comes in at a whopping $3,199.
Steve Lewit: Yeah, I was reading about that.
Gabriel Lewit: Okay. But it does flip over and have a larger screen if that’s important to you. Okay. So a couple places you could go instead, Colombia, South America. I didn’t come up with this. This is from Kiplinger’s.
Steve Lewit: Do I want to go to Colombia?
Gabriel Lewit: Of course. The average hotel cost per night is $45. Your average cost of daily meals is $35, and your typical round trip flight from LAX is $650.
Steve Lewit: Is that a hotel with bugs or without bugs?
Gabriel Lewit: For $45, I think is bug-free. I have some clients that are from Colombia and just say it’s gorgeous there. Yeah. So you got Lush Green Valleys of the coffee triangle, the wild jungles of Tayrona National Park, or you can go to Medellin.
Steve Lewit: What’s that? Is that a beach?
Gabriel Lewit: It’s a city.
Steve Lewit: It’s a city.
Gabriel Lewit: Yes.
Steve Lewit: That sounds interesting for $3,000.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. You could go to Albania in Europe.
Steve Lewit: Albania.
Gabriel Lewit: Yes. So the average hotel cost per night, $50. The average cost of daily meals, $30. And they give you peanuts, that’s what they give you there. And the typical cost of a round trip flight apparently is $700 to Albania, and it’s offering pristine Mediterranean coastlines at a fraction of the cost of neighboring Greece or Croatia.
Steve Lewit: I would never think of going to Albania.
Gabriel Lewit: It says historic castles and vibrant coastal towns called the Albanian Riviera.
Steve Lewit: Ah, okay. All right. I’m intrigued.
Gabriel Lewit: If you’re looking for other possible locales, you’ve got Kenya, Africa.
Steve Lewit: Kenya.
Gabriel Lewit: Yep.
Steve Lewit: Africa.
Gabriel Lewit: And then you can get apparently a complete Kenyan journey in Nairobi and Mombasa.
Steve Lewit: Is that like a safari journey?
Gabriel Lewit: No, no, not like a high price safari. I think you just wander through the…
Steve Lewit: Do you buy life insurance before you wander?
Gabriel Lewit: You just go through the Serengeti on your own. I’m just teasing there. No, but yeah, you can do… There’s national parks. There’s coastal cultural experiences.
Steve Lewit: Why do I feel unsafe going to any of these places?
Gabriel Lewit: Because you’re a scaredy-cat, man.
Steve Lewit: Yeah. It’s like I’m not going there.
Gabriel Lewit: Or you’re not an adventurer.
Steve Lewit: Well, you’re right.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah.
Steve Lewit: Yeah. I guess I’m not.
Gabriel Lewit: You can go to Vietnam and Asia. The average hotel cost is $55 and the average cost of daily meals is $20.
Steve Lewit: My brother went to Vietnam three years ago. He loved it.
Gabriel Lewit: It says there’s exceptional purchasing power.
Steve Lewit: Loved it. Loved the people.
Gabriel Lewit: You can say an elegant five-star hotels, hire private local drivers and experience fine dining all for less than the cost of a new iPhone.
Steve Lewit: Yeah. Yeah. That’s just amazing. That’s just amazing.
Gabriel Lewit: Now, this is all according to Kiplinger’s. I have no independent validation of any of this.
Steve Lewit: Right.
Gabriel Lewit: So do not say I told you so, just in case you’re… A lot higher than that.
Steve Lewit: What are the chances of being kidnapped and ransomed?
Gabriel Lewit: Oh, stop. You’re crazy.
Steve Lewit: I am.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. Okay. Let’s see.
Steve Lewit: Well, I watch all these shows, these series shows where somebody’s always kidnapped and ransomed.
Gabriel Lewit: It’s probably less than being struck by…
Steve Lewit: Somebody in one of these countries.
Gabriel Lewit: You watch too much TV.
Steve Lewit: You’re right.
Gabriel Lewit: And it’s probably a lot less than being struck by lightning.
Steve Lewit: Okay.
Gabriel Lewit: So, there you go.
Steve Lewit: Okay.
Gabriel Lewit: Okay.
Steve Lewit: I’m still not going.
Gabriel Lewit: Well, hey, you do you. Okay. Topic, main topic for today.
Steve Lewit: You just wrote me off there. Okay.
Gabriel Lewit: Okay. You wanted to talk about analysis paralysis, Steve.
Steve Lewit: Yeah. I really think this is very…
Gabriel Lewit: Intro this a little bit for us.
Steve Lewit: Look, we all have to make decisions about lots of things in our lives. Everything from what to have for breakfast, should I change my jobs? Should I invest in Alphabet? And all these decisions come with lots and lots of different ideas and theories and researches. And what many people, including myself sometimes, is that I do so much thinking about my decision, I don’t make a decision. And I kick the can down the road, and two months later I realize I still haven’t solved or made a decision about something oftentimes really important.
Gabriel Lewit: So sometimes the biggest problem isn’t a wrong decision, it’s no decision.
Steve Lewit: Which is a decision. And most people know that. And it comes from… Gabriel, we love our engineer clients, right?
Gabriel Lewit: We do, yes.
Steve Lewit: I mean, seriously.
Gabriel Lewit: We love all of our clients.
Steve Lewit: Yes. But I selected that group for a reason, because what do they do?
Gabriel Lewit: Well, they like to analyze every aspect of every decision as I do because I am very engineering minded myself. And it can lead, if you’re not careful, to the inability to make a decision because you always want more data, you always want to compare to a couple more things, and you always want to be 100% sure before you do it that you’re making the right decision, and that can really slow decision making down.
Steve Lewit: And you often hear conflicting information about the same thing. So now you don’t know who to trust. And if you don’t know who to trust out there for information, it’s hard to trust yourself in making a decision.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a lot of reasons why people don’t make decisions, but the general term is analysis paralysis is one of them, which is when you have too many decisions to make and too many options to compare, you make no decision at all.
Steve Lewit: Yeah. So Gabriel, is that fear of failure that, look, I have to analyze this to perfection, otherwise I’m going to fail and then people are going to think less of me or I’m going to look stupid or stuff like that.
Gabriel Lewit: Well, very philosophical of you, very deep. I’m not sure if we would…
Steve Lewit: It wasn’t that deep.
Gabriel Lewit: Would point to a specific reason for it, but it could be. Yeah. I think it’s a close cousin to the other version of this, which there’s just too much to do. I don’t know where to start. It’s kind of like analysis paralysis. They’re very closely related, but they are a little bit different. I find a lot of people find this concept of retirement planning so overwhelming. There’s just so many possible things to consider from income to investments, to taxes, to estate planning, to overall planning, to income strategies. Oh my gosh, where do I start? I’m just not going to do anything yet.
Steve Lewit: So how do I get past? How do I make a decision and feel good about it and confident and then move on? How do I do that?
Gabriel Lewit: Well, let’s see. Have you ever stood on, which I know you’re afraid of heights, but at the edge of a tall diving board?
Steve Lewit: Yes, I have actually.
Gabriel Lewit: And at some point, you might be a little scared to jump because it looks really far down.
Steve Lewit: Yep.
Gabriel Lewit: And what do you got to do?
Steve Lewit: Walk back to the safety. That’s what I got to do. What do you got to do?
Gabriel Lewit: You jump forward.
Steve Lewit: Yeah. I actually did that because I was in gym class and I had like 30 kids watching me and I wasn’t walking back.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Lewit: But that’s peer pressure though.
Gabriel Lewit: No, no. I guess my point there is sometimes…
Steve Lewit: That’s not a real decision.
Gabriel Lewit: You may not feel 100% ready, but you know it’s important. You know it’s probably not going to really hurt you. You just got to do it. And so sometimes you can be not 100% ready, just enough to… Because once you step off the edge, you’re diving.
Steve Lewit: You are.
Gabriel Lewit: You’re diving.
Steve Lewit: You’ve dove.
Gabriel Lewit: You’ve dove, right? So maybe this is as simple as, gosh, there’s so much stuff here. I’m just going to reach out to Gabe or just going to reach out to Steve. It’s enough momentum to get it going.
Steve Lewit: We’re talking about money and running out of money or losing money in the stock. These are bigger decisions.
Gabriel Lewit: Well, these are more important than jumping off of a diving board.
Steve Lewit: So, you go to one advisor and you say, “I need income in retirement.” And they say, “Well, you should use dividends.” And you go to another advisor and that person says, “Well, use a 4% withdrawal rate in the market.” You go to another advisor and says, “You should really buy an annuity.” And then you talk to each advisor about the other advisor and they all have bad things to say about what the other advisor said because they’re trying to sell you what they have. How do I wiggle through that other than I’ll just do more research and a year later you haven’t figured out how to get your income?
Gabriel Lewit: That’s, again, a very tough one. There’s your gut feeling. Let’s say you have to decide that you intend to make a decision one way or the other.
Steve Lewit: So, do you set a decision?
Gabriel Lewit: Other than I’m not going to do anything.
Steve Lewit: Do you set a decision date? If I were your client and I said, “Gabriel, I’m up at night thinking about all of this.” Do you say, “Let’s set a date and make a decision by that day. Let’s just set a date.” How do you help me?
Gabriel Lewit: Well, you could ask each one of those in this hypothetical example. If you were interviewing four advisors, you could talk to each of the advisors and say, “I’m really struggling to make a decision. I don’t know who to trust, what decision to make, who do I go with, who do I not go with?” What would you say for someone like me? How do I make that decision? And what might help you make the decision is asking that question of each of the four people.
Steve Lewit: And how it’s answered.
Gabriel Lewit: And how it’s answered and whether it gives you warm and fuzzies or makes you not warm and fuzzy, right? So that might be something that helps. But yeah, I think at some point you’ve got to recognize that if you’re never going to get to 100%, there’s a… I forget what the phrase is. There’s something about if you wait to 100%, you never get there, right? But you’ve got to get to 90% or 80% or something like that. And that’s where you go, right? Because if you wait to 100%, you never get there.
Steve Lewit: Right.
Gabriel Lewit: So, you’ve got to set your bar at maybe not 100%, but 80% or 85% like, okay, I like this guy more than the other guys and I think he’s going to do most of what I want. Let’s move ahead.
Steve Lewit: Yeah. So I think your analogy is not thinking about, your analogy is really good about being at the end of the diving board because at some point each decision, it seems to me, it is a leap of faith at some point because you cannot… First of all, you don’t know the future. It’s impossible. It’s always unknown. And you’ve got all this information. At some point, you just got to say, “I’m good and I’m going to go with it.”
Gabriel Lewit: Well, look, I recently put in a shed in my backyard, and this is not the same as planning your life savings with a retirement.
Steve Lewit: Was it a $300,000 share?
Gabriel Lewit: It was not, fortunately. Okay, substantially less than that, but it’s not like a $20 purchase.
Steve Lewit: Yeah, it’s a meaningful sum of money.
Gabriel Lewit: You got to install concrete, and once the concrete’s there, you can’t move the concrete. I mean, there’s some real solid decisions here, and I do the reviews and I look at X, Y, and Z, and I went and talked to a couple places, and finally I had to make a decision, and the entire time I’m like, “Gosh, I got my fingers crossed.” I’m like, “I sure hope this works.”
Steve Lewit: Sure.
Gabriel Lewit: Sometimes when you have a new relationship like that, you start to see signs right out of the gate. They’re responding, they’re communicative, they’re giving you estimated install dates, their communication back and forth is good, and you start to feel better even immediately at that point.
Steve Lewit: More confident, yep.
Gabriel Lewit: And then there’s other people you sign the agreement on, and then it’s crickets, and you don’t hear back, and you don’t know what the next step is. The key is, at that point, you may not have moved your money yet. So you can start working with an advisor, start to have those planning meetings, and get a sense of how well it’s flowing right out of the gate.
Steve Lewit: And how you feel about that, comfortable…
Gabriel Lewit: That’s the nice thing about a financial advisor is unless you don’t buy anything until you’re really confident with the advisor that has any sort of lockup period or anything for your money, but if you decide that you don’t have a good experience or you’re not getting the communication that you need…
Steve Lewit: Go somewhere else.
Gabriel Lewit: You just go somewhere else.
Steve Lewit: Yeah, that simple.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah.
Steve Lewit: Yeah. So we talk to a lot of folks about their trust and how often have you heard, “Yeah, I’m working on that.”
Gabriel Lewit: A lot.
Steve Lewit: A lot, right?
Gabriel Lewit: Yes.
Steve Lewit: So that is procrastination. I’m working on that.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. It’s another form, which we’re running a little out of time here, but it’s procrastinating on something that you don’t want to do just because it’s not fun.
Steve Lewit: Yeah, certainly…
Gabriel Lewit: Different than analysis paralysis.
Steve Lewit: Talking about the end of your life and what happens is not a laugh moment.
Gabriel Lewit: No, it’s rarely on anybody’s, I can’t wait to do this list.
Steve Lewit: It’s on your no-do bucket list.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. So if it’s not on your, I can’t wait to do this list, it just tends to just get bumped to tomorrow and then to tomorrow and then to next year. So you have to recognize that it’s not on your, I’m interested in this list, it’s in your drudgery zone list and still tackle it anyways. Give yourself a deadline to do it, get it done.
Steve Lewit: So, it’s something about trusting other people and the advice they’re giving, and there’s something about trusting yourself and the decisions you make. And those have to be nurtured over time.
Gabriel Lewit: Indeed.
Steve Lewit: Yeah.
Gabriel Lewit: Yeah. Well said.
Steve Lewit: I see you want to end this podcast. I can tell when you want to end.
Gabriel Lewit: Is it because the clock says we’re over our time?
Steve Lewit: It probably is, but I’m not looking at the clock. I’m looking at you. You’re looking at the clock.
Gabriel Lewit: Yes.
Steve Lewit: So, through you, I know that you’re going to say next. Well, folks.
Gabriel Lewit: Very observant. Well, folks, have yourself a wonderful day. We love talking with you here. Thanks for joining us on Our Two Cents. We look forward to having you on this show, the next one, and stay well till then. And if you have any questions, you can reach out to us, 847-499-3330 or email us info@sglfinancial.com. We would love to talk to you, help you make some financial decisions, get you to jump off that diving board if we can. Take the next step, if you will.
Steve Lewit: I’m going to eat the peanuts.
Gabriel Lewit: And then off we go with your future retirement plan. So stay well and we’ll talk to you next time.
Steve Lewit: Be well, everybody. Be well.
Gabriel Lewit: Bye now.
Steve 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.
Disclosure: Investment Advisory services are offered through SGL Financial LLC, an SEC Registered Investment Adviser. Registration with the SEC does not imply a certain level of skill or expertise. Insurance and other financial products are offered separately through individually licensed and appointed agents.
