The wrong people to have around you – financially

​With most things in life, the people you choose to surround yourself with have a large impact and influence on your decisions. This is no different when it comes to your financials.

Having no one around you, financially

• Being able to talk about your financial situation with someone is important.
• Having someone to talk to can help reduce anxiety and may even help you see solutions to problems you couldn’t see before.

The “Yes” person

• Very supportive people of their friends.
• However, they will agree with anything you decide on even if they have good reasons to disagree.
• This becomes an issue when you genuinely need feedback and trust their opinion.

The man with the hammer

• “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.
• If someone has an incentive to look at things a certain way, that’s how they’ll see things.

The expert in their own field

• They may be experts at a topic or field, but they don’t know what they don’t know.

• It’s not what they get wrong, but what they miss when it comes to decisions.

People more worried about sounding good than being right

• These are the people that follow that latest fads or topics of popularity to sound interesting.

The “more is better” person

• When around people like this, you may have the feeling of missing out. Especially, when they’ve recently had a big win with an investment or something similar.
• Your situation and goals may be completely different, and the risk might completely outweigh the reward.

 “Strengtheners”

• These are people who need the people around them to make the same decisions as them, so they are not in the situation alone.
• They do not care to think about the situation the people around them are in.

“The Joneses”

• “Keeping up with the Joneses”.
• These are people who look the part of large wealth but are usually underneath a lot of debt.
• This is an irrational, psychological habit to overspend on material items, to your own detriment.

There are many different types of biases towards people’s opinions and it’s important to be aware of that when around others.

Written by Ali Hogue