Hey Reader,

Someone called me intimidating on LinkedIn last week.

My first reaction was to feel offended. My second, a beat later, was to get curious.

Because it wasn’t the first time. And it’s rarely my hot takes people flinch at. It’s the CV.

So I asked him why. Not to argue. I genuinely wanted to know, because I go out of my way to write about behaviour, not fear‑driven market noise.

And there it was. My own experience, used as a reason to keep me at arm’s length.

For a second it stung. Then I realised it was the most useful thing I heard all month.

Because that one sentence explains something bigger.

Not just why finance professionals struggle with their own money. Why so many people who look sorted from the outside quietly feel anything but.

Some context, since it matters for what follows.

I spent nearly a decade at Goldman Sachs, building the firm’s custody network across Asia and overseeing more than $20bn in client assets from London and Singapore.

If you work in finance, that reads as normal.

From the outside? It sounds intimidating.

And that's exactly the problem. When you look like you’ve figured it out, everyone assumes you have. Including you.

So let me say the thing that rarely gets said out loud.

Working in finance does not mean the people around you talk about personal finance. I'm not talking about traders. I mean the rest of us in finance who don't trade for a living but are still assumed to have it all figured out.

I sat among brilliant people, a lot of them former athletes, all high-performers. And still, we rarely spoke about money on the office floor.

Personal finance is not the office conversation outsiders assume it is.

If you've done everything right but still feel behind, here's why standard financial advice was never built for you.

🌱 Save this. You're about to feel seen in three minutes.

1. Standard advice assumes you’re starting from zero. You’re not.

"Save three months of expenses" lands as obvious. You knew that at 22.

Your problem is the opposite one. You know enough to ask sharper questions than the advice ever answers. If you're the one who'd catch your family in a crisis, three months isn't your number. And you know enough about inflation to know cash sitting idle quietly loses to it.

So you over-engineer the basics and still feel behind. Not because you know too little.

Because nothing out there is built for how much you already know.

2. Most "investing tips" are trading tips in disguise.

Scroll through most “investing tips” and you’ll find mostly trading ideas: hot names, timing calls, and tactics that assume you can outguess the market. Meanwhile your compliance policy bans single stocks anyway.

The patient, boring approach quietly wins. In one of the most-cited studies of retail investors, the most active traders earned around 11.4% a year while the market returned 17.9%. Roughly six points a year, lost to activity.

That gap is about timing, switching, and reacting to volatility instead of following a plan.

Nobody builds a marketing budget around simplicity, because nobody profits when you keep it simple.

3. The 50/30/20 rule assumes a life you don’t live.

Half your income on essentials, thirty percent on fun, twenty percent on the future.

Early in your career you can often flip that maths entirely, before life's fixed costs pile up. Leave it too long and it only gets harder.

Aside from never having the time, what's missing is someone showing you what the other side looks like when your money is tied to your actual life.

Not saving for a vague future, but for the business you want to start, or the year you want to take back.

4. You can see straight through a salesy advisor.

That discernment protects you. But it also strands you.

Here’s the honest bit. It’s not that you don’t want to sort this yourself. It's also not that you're not capable.

It’s that you’re at you're working from 8-8, then squeezing your personal life into the three hours left, running on fumes.

The headspace to research it properly just isn't there. What you're missing isn't willpower. It's someone who gets your reality and isn't trying to sell you a financial product on the back of it.

Someone who gets where you've been without monetising your existential dread.

People call that a chat. I much prefer it, and wish I'd had one when I first joined finance.

5. Everyone assumes you’ve already maxed out.

The world tells most people to earn more. You’re told you already earn the most you can.

But in Gallup's research for Edward Jones, nearly seven in ten people earning over $135,000 said they don't feel financially fulfilled. When researchers looked closer, income didn't explain it.

What separated people was how much control they felt, and whether their money was moving them toward the life they wanted.
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That’s the real question. Not how to earn more. How to make what you already earn build something.

None of this is here to make you feel stuck. Literally the opposite.

It's to name the gap out loud, so you stop treating it as a personal failing.

It isn't one.

And it matters more now than it used to. As AI reshapes what valuable work looks like in finance, getting clear on what your money is funding is what lets you dictate your next move, else your salary will dictate it for you.

Here's where that ends.

You can already see through the article, the research, the advisor. The missing piece was never information.

It was a simple structure you can actually run, and the follow‑through to keep running it, so your money stops being the thing quietly blocking your next move.

Don't hand over your portfolio. Treat your own money with the same rigour you apply at work.

If one of the five reasons landed, tell me which. Reply with just the number, 1 to 5, and I'll tell you the one that took me the longest to sort out myself.

And if you'd rather not do it alone, that's the work I do 1:1 through my Wealth Clarity Accelerator. You walk away with a portfolio you actually understand, spending that matches your goals, and a clear line to your next move. If you want 2027 to be your year of change, reach out or book a call, and we'll find a time.

New here?

I'm conscious I don't send emails as often as I'd like. And that means you don't see me in your inbox reminding you of how important this work is.

Which is why, I'd love for you to:

• ​Browse the free resources to see how I work first.
• Get your loved ones to subscribe to receive my free emails, so you can learn together.

Sources:

• Barber & Odean, UC Berkeley (active-trader vs market returns);
• Gallup for Edward Jones, 2026 (financial fulfilment among high earners).

P.S. None of this thinking is mine alone. It's shaped by people I keep coming back to: Andrew Hallam on simple investing across borders, Morgan Housel on the psychology of money, Annie Duke on making better decisions under uncertainty, and Nick Maggiulli on leaning on data to simplify the jargon.

As always, I'm rooting for you to win with your wealth.

Sanam