When financial expertise becomes a blind spot

There is no shortage of people explaining the mechanics. There are specialists who can tell you how mortgages are underwritten, how investment portfolios should be structured, and what the technically correct thing to do with your money is. I have extensive experience in financial services myself, but I am not an expert in every corner of a complicated, multifaceted industry, and I don’t pretend to be.

What I am interested in is what happens when all that expertise meets an actual human being.

A few weeks ago, I got a message from someone who had read one of my MoneySense articles about life and financial stages. They agreed with most of what I had written, but there was one thing they wanted to clarify. They thought I had misunderstood something about how newcomers can be treated when applying for a mortgage and explained why the situation was more nuanced than I had suggested.

They weren’t being combative. Quite the opposite; they were trying to help. And they were right about the mechanics. The problem was that the mechanics weren’t what I was talking about.

We were looking at the same thing differently

The point I was making was much simpler: a new immigrant buying a home today pays today’s price, while someone at a comparable life stage who bought years ago may have locked in yesterday’s price.

That was the entire observation. I wasn’t making an argument about mortgage qualification or suggesting that immigrants are necessarily paying more because they are immigrants. I was making an observation about timing.

I explained that my writing focuses on the human and psychological side of money, not the technical mechanics of how it works. There is an entire industry that exists to answer those technical questions, and readers can and should go to a specialist for that. They came back and acknowledged that they had misunderstood what I was saying.

That exchange has been on my mind, because I think there was something bigger happening than a simple misunderstanding.

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They weren’t wrong, but their expertise had led them toward a conclusion about what I was saying before fully understanding what I was saying. That is where expertise can become a blind spot.

I see the same thing with my own money

I have had several financial advisors over the years, and I value their expertise. I listen to their advice for most of the year, and I rely on them to help me make decisions I wouldn’t be equipped to make on my own.

But there is one thing I do that they really don’t like. When things in the world feel like they’re going mad, I sometimes take my investments out of the market and let the money sit in cash for 30 to 60 days.

Objectively, I understand that this isn’t a great wealth-building strategy. I know the arguments against it. Markets are difficult to time, sitting in cash can mean missing gains, and long-term investing generally rewards staying invested. None of that is news to me, but I do it anyway.

I’m a small business owner, and when everything around me feels chaotic, I would rather have my money sitting there not growing than sitting there potentially going down. For me, in those moments, the value isn’t the return, it’s the relief. I want a little time where I don’t have to think about my money.

Every year, when I do this, my financial advisor tries to talk me out of it. The reasons are technically correct. The alternatives they suggest would probably serve my portfolio better. But sometimes I’m not asking for a better investment strategy, I’m telling them what I need.

The expert sees the system, the person sees their life

We tend to assume that knowing more automatically means seeing more—and often, it does. But expertise also gives you a frame through which you see the world, and inside that frame, it can become difficult to notice what exists outside it.

A mortgage professional sees risk, qualification, and the mechanics of lending. A financial advisor sees asset allocation, returns, and long-term wealth creation. Those things matter. But the person sitting across from them may be thinking about something else entirely: whether they can sleep at night, whether they feel like they’ve fallen behind, whether they simply need to stop thinking about money for a little while. None of that shows up on a spreadsheet, but all of it is still part of the decision.

There’s a reason for that gap, and it isn’t a character flaw in either expert. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein spent years on opposite sides of a debate about when intuition can be trusted. When they finally sat down to compare notes, they agreed on something important: an expert’s gut instinct is only reliable in stable, predictable environments, and only once that expert has had enough repeated feedback to learn the patterns.

A lender who has underwritten thousands of mortgage files has exactly that. What they don’t have is the same pattern for one specific person’s tolerance for risk, or what 30 days of not checking the market is worth to someone’s sleep. Nobody gets fast, repeated feedback on that. It isn’t a pattern an outsider can learn, no matter how much of an expert they are.

Their expertise wasn’t the problem in either of my stories. It was exactly as good as it should have been, aimed at a question I hadn’t asked, or a point I wasn’t making.

I’ve been guilty of this too

This isn’t a problem reserved for financial professionals. I do it myself. I spend my career helping businesses solve problems, and my instinct is to optimize. Someone tells me what they’re struggling with, and my brain immediately starts building the solution.

Sometimes that’s exactly what they need. Sometimes they’re still trying to explain the problem, and I’ve already answered a more complete question than the one they asked.

There is what is right, and there is what is right for the person

I don’t think we should tell people to ignore experts. Quite the opposite. Their knowledge can save us from expensive, painful, and sometimes irreversible mistakes.

But sometimes the technically correct answer is exactly what someone needs, and sometimes it isn’t. The only way to know the difference is to listen long enough to understand what the person is saying before deciding what they need to hear.

They were both right. I still did what was right for me, and that doesn’t make them wrong. It just means their expertise, and my life, were never quite answering the same question.

About Vickram Agarwal

Vickram Agarwal is a multiple-time founder and award-winning entrepreneur. He leads S1:E2, a business strategy consulting firm, and contributes to The Globe and Mail, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Inc.

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