What a friend on a stage, a memoir, and my dog Rogue taught me about the conversations we postpone.
The financial decisions people put off are rarely the ones they forgot. They are the ones that came with a good reason attached. Say the reason out loud, then put a date on the decision. That is most of the work.
A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a room in downtown Columbia at Main Street Summit, listening to a good friend talk about how she makes content. She mentioned, without any drama about it, that she would do almost anything to avoid being in front of a camera. It’s simply uncomfortable. So she has built her whole process around that discomfort.
I sat there and got convicted.
Because when I started Truman Wealth, I recorded a little video every week. Money Mindset Monday. Me, a phone propped up on a stack of something, ninety seconds, one idea. I was not good at them. I made them anyway.
Then I got busy. Real clients, real calendars, real work. And the moment I had a legitimate reason not to record, I stopped. There was no decision. There was a Monday, and then another Monday, and then a couple of years.
My dog Rogue does the same thing when it thunders. She goes into the closet and burrows in under my husband's hanging shirts, which is a fine solution for Rogue and a less fine solution for my husband, who then goes to work covered in dog hair.
I am a financial advisor who quit making videos about money mindset because I got too busy talking to people about their money mindset. Sit with that one for a second. I have.
A Good Hiding Place Is the Hardest One to Leave
Rogue is not being ridiculous. Thunder is loud, it is real, and it cannot be reasoned with. Hiding is a sensible response to something genuinely unpleasant that you have no ability to stop. She found a thing that helps, and she uses it.
Mine was better dressed than hers. I did not burrow under anything. I hid behind a full calendar, which is the most respectable hiding place ever invented. Nobody questions a busy person. Not your team, not your spouse, and certainly not you.
That is the trouble with a good excuse. A bad excuse gets caught. A good one just sits there, quietly doing its job, for years.
But here is the part I did not notice until I watched my husband run a lint roller over a clean shirt for the second time in a week. Rogue is comfortable. She is not the one paying for it.
A Clock You Cannot Hear
This month I read “Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage” by Belle Burden. I picked it up expecting a divorce story. It is one, but the line I keep returning to is not really about her marriage at all.
"It is the possibility that there was a timetable, a clock I didn't hear ticking."
Belle Burden, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage (Dial Press, 2026), p. 206
She is writing years after the decisions that shaped her life were made. A run of ordinary choices that seemed fine, or small, or not worth a hard conversation on the day. And then a morning when the bill for all of them arrived at once.
Elsewhere she writes that the cost of feeling safe was being controlled. “Two sides of the same coin,” she calls it. I would put it a little differently for our purposes. The cost of staying comfortable is that something else gets to decide.
I have no idea what those Money Mindset Mondays would have been worth. The clock ran either way. I was just not listening to it.
An Unspoken Bargain Is Not a Bad Deal. It Is a Deal Nobody Read.
There is one detail I cannot stop thinking about, and it comes from Alex Kuczynski's review of the book in The New York Times. Burden is a Harvard-educated lawyer who had been working at a Manhattan firm. According to the review, once she and her husband had children, she handed over every aspect of their finances to him. They never discussed who would work and who would stay home either. Kuczynski calls it an unspoken bargain.
Read that again with me. A trained lawyer. A twenty-year marriage. And the single largest ongoing arrangement in the household was never once said out loud.
There is a cheap version of this where we decide she should have known better. She was a lawyer. She knew plenty. This is not a story about intelligence. It is a story about how quickly an arrangement that is working becomes an arrangement nobody examines.
Most unspoken bargains are fine. Somebody does the taxes, somebody books the travel. The trouble is that you cannot tell the fine ones from the expensive ones without saying them out loud, and saying them out loud is exactly the thing nobody wants to do on a Tuesday when everything is going well.
Somebody Else Is Wearing the Dog Hair
Once you see this pattern, it turns up everywhere in our work. And it almost always sends the bill somewhere else.
The beneficiary form that still names an ex-spouse, because updating it means a phone call, a form, and ten minutes of picturing your own funeral.
The will drafted when the kids were small, now sitting in a drawer while the kids have kids.
The conversation with aging parents that the whole family agrees should happen, and that the whole family also agrees can happen at Thanksgiving. Next Thanksgiving.
The business owner who has built something real and cannot say what happens to it if he is hit by a bus, because there is always one more quarter to get through first.
The spouse who handles the money, the spouse who has never logged in, and the shared unexamined agreement that this is just how it has always been.
Every one of those has a good reason attached. That is what they have in common. Not laziness. Not ignorance. A reason a reasonable person would accept without blinking.
And in every single one of them, the person who avoided the decision is not the person who deals with the consequences. Your kids read the old beneficiary form. Your spouse meets the attorney. Your business partner finds out what you never wrote down. You get the comfort now. Somebody who loves you gets the lint roller later.
The storm does not check, either. It never asks whether you were busy.
This Is Not a Character Flaw
These topics get avoided for a reason. They ask you to picture the worst available version of your own future: divorce, death, disability, a parent who no longer knows your name. And they ask you to do it while everything is fine, which is the hardest possible moment because nothing is forcing your hand.
Avoidance is not a defect in the machine. It is the machine working. Your brain is doing exactly what it evolved to do with a threat it cannot solve today, which is get away from it.
So no, I do not think less of you for the drawer. I have a camera I did not pick up for years.
What Actually Helps a Dog Who Is Afraid of Thunder
You do not haul her out of the closet mid-storm and explain meteorology.
What helps is boring and slow and done on a clear day. Small exposures when nothing is happening. A little at a time, in a calm room, with someone she trusts, long before the sky changes color.
That’s the reason we do this work in the order we do it.
Facing a hard financial decision on a quiet Tuesday is a conversation. Facing the very same decision after a diagnosis, a death, or an envelope you did not expect is a scramble, with worse options, less time, and everyone involved at their worst. Same decision. Wildly different day to be making it on.
Early financial planning may help reduce stress and complexity compared to addressing decisions under time pressure. Taking action on a planned timeline rather than in response to a crisis can make the process smoother for all involved.
Pick Your Night
October is the one month we all agree to be frightened on purpose. We pick the movie and the night ourselves, with lights on in the next room and candy involved. Nobody makes us do it, which is exactly why it is fun instead of traumatic.
You can do the same thing with the decision you have been carrying around. Choose the hour and the room, and bring someone who is not afraid of it.
So here is my ask, and it is a small one. Think of one thing you have been meaning to deal with. Not the list. The form, the call, the document, the conversation. Say out loud what your good reason has been, because it sounds different out loud. Then put a date on the calendar.
And if you would rather not do it by yourself, that is precisely what we are here for. Book a complimentary 30-minute discovery call.
Complexity does not disappear because you hired us. What disappears is being alone in it. That is the work we do, and it is most of what people are actually buying.
I am recording again, by the way. Badly. On purpose.
Mind the shirts, my friends. LIVE A WEALTHY LIFE.
This content is intended for informational and illustrative purposes only and should not be construed as personalized investment, tax, or legal advice. Any hypothetical examples are for illustrative purposes only and do not represent actual client results. Investment advisory services offered through Truman Wealth Advisors, LLC, a registered investment advisor. The firm's ADV Brochure and Form CRS are available, at no charge, on our website https://www.trumanwealthadvisors.com. They include important disclosures and should be read carefully. There is a risk of loss from an investment in securities, including the loss of principal.
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