The client's gut is financial data

The retirement and college numbers are on the spreadsheet, and they point one way. The client wants to go another. Reaching for more analysis is the standard move. In episode 196 of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and Carl Richards suggest a different one: ask what the client's gut says, then treat the answer as data, not stubbornness.

The two start with a hard limit on what financial analysis can do. Resources are finite, and the numbers show how each dollar functions in a retirement scenario or an education scenario. They do not choose. No mathematical function weighs a parent's wish to fund a grandchild's school against the certainty of a retirement shortfall. The numbers describe the outcome; they do not price the feeling. That is where feelings enter. A lingering sense that something is off often reflects a subconscious recognition of factors no one has fully articulated. The feeling is not the conclusion, in the episode's telling; it is the invitation to get curious.

Getting curious does not require a therapy license. Kitces and Richards run through a plain script: ask what the client thinks of an option, how it feels, then follow up a few times. The goal is to find the thread of intuition. Clients' stated goals do not always match what they really want underneath, so the conversation is the way in. The episode applies the same logic to the advisor's own discomfort. If a business opportunity looks good on paper but the gut is not bought in, that is an invitation for self-examination, not more spreadsheets.

The episode insists on a nuance: gut feelings come from everywhere. Exhaustion. Intimidation. Socialization about what a person should want. A client's hesitation about a decision may have nothing to do with the decision itself. But it is still information. It points to a different adjustment that may be needed. The advisor who waves it away as misbehavior loses exactly that information.

This is the latest in a line of work at Kitces.com on the psychology of planning. Earlier this month, a guest post there broke the endowment effect into loss aversion, identity, and anchoring to explain why a client who agrees to sell still won't sell. The through-line is the same: client behavior is evidence, not a breakdown. And it is worth remembering that Michael Kitces is head of planning strategy at Focus Partners Wealth, which works with near- and current retirees, a population that lives inside these trade-offs every year.

That reframes the job. The goal is not to talk someone out of a gut feeling or into the model. It is to align the two, letting the analysis inform the instinct until both show the same picture. Plans built that way tend to be fulfilling and sustainable. The reason is plain: a plan that feels wrong to its owner will not be followed. The spreadsheet loses on the first bad year.

The cheapest diligence in planning is a question that costs nothing and reveals a lot. After the next trade-off, ask the client how they feel about it, and let the answer sit inside the analysis. The client does not need to explain it. With practice, the asking gets easier for the advisor and the answering gets easier for the client, building momentum in the wider relationship. The feeling was always doing the heavy lifting; the advisor just needed to ask.