How me manage money is about emotions more than facts

Those of us that work in fintech constantly underestimate how emotional these decisions are. I recently discovered my mother had a retirement account with ~40% of her life's savings THAT SHE HAD COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN ABOUT. She's almost 70 and retired more than 5 years ago. 🧵

A happy accident, but one born of a lifetime pattern of fear, shame, and avoidance. This is someone with 2 masters degrees, a PhD, and several published books to her name. She is not a dumb lady. Her pattern is not the exception, it's the norm (except for maybe the happy ending).

It's not a failure of financial literacy or a lack of information. It's not even that these decisions are that hard, it's that they're often emotionally terrifying which creates this lifetime cycle of learned failure. When you work in the space, it's so easy to forget that.

I work in insurance. It's easy to get caught up in the details of insurance - limits, deductibles, coinsurance, underwriting criteria - and think that's what people actually care about because that's what the people in your highly passionate and informed universe care about.

The rest of the world doesn't care. People aren't buying our products, our products are just a means to an end. Insurance is buying peace of mind, investing is imagining a better future, borrowing is bringing that future forward. We forget that at our own peril and yet most do.