Blog

Hello and welcome many of you to my quarterly newsletter.  My name is David Lutz Jr and I have been a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ at Celtic Financial Services, LLC for the past 12 years and in the personal finance business for 24 years. 

You will come to find that many of my topics that I discuss each quarter revolve around human emotions.  Whether it is greed, fear, sacrifice, or impatience we are all emotional about our money.  The reason for that is we understand how long it takes to earn it and see how quickly it takes to spend it.  It is most painful though when we see the value of our accounts go down.  Sadly, during those times I often see people doing the opposite of what they should be doing.  For example, if you saw a TV set “on sale” where the price is cheaper, you’d buy it.  But, when the stock market drops and prices go cheaper, many people aren’t looking to buy; but sell instead.  Why is that?  Well, a lot of research has been done on human emotion and money through a field called behavioral finance.  Things like loss aversion, confirmation bias, overconfidence bias, and anchoring are a few of the stories I will try to share with you so that you can hopefully learn to better manage your emotions when it comes to your money so that you can come out ahead of those people who may not be privy to these concepts.  After all, making the wrong decisions with your money at the wrong times can be detrimental not only to how much you accumulate over your lifetime, but also the future lifestyle you hope to live.  Our role is to assist you in living your best life possible by helping you make wise decisions with your money, but that mostly begins with managing your behavior and emotions.  So, how do we go about that to where you can see the big picture? Well it all starts with using the financial planning process.