It’s you. Your habits, your consistency, and whether you’re willing to do the less exciting work of showing up every month regardless of what the headlines say.
by: Duncan Barker, Perspective Advisory.
The Marketing Machine
You’ve seen the ads. A billboard with smiling faces on a mountain slope. A father and son walking on a beach at sunset. The line that tells you your future is already here — you just need to sign for it.
That’s the machine. Financial services businesses that advertise have perfected a very specific skill: triggering a response in you that’s irrational but deeply felt, then pointing you toward a product. A loan. A financing plan. An investment. All wrapped in a story about the life you deserve, starting today.
Here’s the part they don’t put on the billboard: it’s not for you. It’s for them.
Why They Do It
Every one of those products puts your money into their business, not your future. Most of them are finance arrangements that charge you interest — and compounding works far more powerfully on debt than it ever does on investments. Once you’re inside a debt cycle, getting out of it is close to impossible.
I’ve lived this. I got stuck in exactly this cycle when I started out as a chartered accountant. Start a professional career and the credit facilities arrive on their own, cars, clothes, whatever you want, all on credit. Get a salary increase and your limit goes up with it. It’s a spiral, and unless you actively stop it, you never get out.
Financial institutions don’t build products for you. They build products to keep you as a client, so they can sell you the next one. I’ll be honest, my own company isn’t immune from that instinct either. The difference has to be that ours is built on advice and service, not a pure product sale riding on your emotions.
The Real Distraction
Here’s where it gets interesting: even once people wake up to the marketing, they usually swap one trap for another. Obsessing over returns and costs instead. Which fund performed best. Whose fees are lowest. Which platform has the edge.
It feels like diligence. It isn’t the thing that matters.
Consistency in your contributions and your commitment to building wealth is what actually determines your outcome. Not shaving costs or chasing returns. Just increasing what you put away each year, in line with or ahead of inflation will beat inflation regardless of what any fund manager does. Managing costs and maximising returns only matters once you’re already consistent. There’s no point optimising either if you’re not showing up in the first place.
The Noise Machine
Media and the investment industry have built an entire ecosystem around keeping your eyes on returns and costs, because it’s a game you’re never quite finished playing. Now it’s not just fund fact sheets, it’s influencers, “AI edge” trading tools promising to beat the market, and podcasts you can binge all day to stay across every global twitch.
All of it keeps you hooked on uncertainty and the fear of missing out. None of it makes you wealthier. If anything, it’s a drug. Even I catch myself getting pulled back into the noise every now and again. It feeds short-term thinking in a game that only pays out over the long-term.
So What Is It, Then?
So if it’s not the returns, and it’s not the costs — what is it?
It’s you. Your habits, your consistency, and whether you’re willing to do the less exciting work of showing up every month regardless of what the headlines say. That’s not a marketing problem to solve. It’s a control problem, and control is something you already have, whether you’ve been using it or not.
That’s where we go next.
