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Saving and investing require some patience to produce profits. Speculating is often more appropriate for the impatient. However, both patience and impatience can be character flaws with saving, investing, and speculating. Investors who pride themselves on their great patience can ride losing stocks into bankruptcy. Appropriately patient stock investors sell when the fundamentals start to deteriorate. Impatient real estate investors run up commissions and expenses trading properties before they mature. Patient real estate investors improve the property, upgrade the tenants and wait for the peak of the next up cycle before they sale. Patient options traders often miss the best opportunities to make profits and watch their options expire worthless.

No matter how small a part you played, write it down. No matter how minor a character flaw, write it down. For example, if you are baffled by your tech investments, you might write down, “I bought the investments. I believed they were good long-term investments. I am something of a conformist. I bought them because everybody from the office was buying them.

My character flaw is being an occasional conformist, as most of the time I am more of a rebel.” If you have resentment at the insurance salesperson who sold you the variable annuity, you might write down, “I needed a lot of money in a tax-deferred account right away. So I bought the product. Maybe I was a little greedy, trying to get a lot of savings too quickly. I was also jealous of Maggie who has all that money in her 401(k).” If you are resentful that your stock options became worthless, you might write down, “I was a victim of sales pressure. They offered me the low salary with substantial options showing me how well other employees had done with their options.

Okay, I did take the job. Maybe my character flaw was greed. But I also had those options for five years and could have exercised them early on and made a lot of money. It wasn’t just greed. Every time the stock took a dive, I rationalized it away, believing the original sales pitch I was given. I am a very loyal character. But in this situation my loyalty was a character flaw. I stayed loyal to the stock and the company despite all the evidence around me that things were falling apart.” A very small character flaw can have a big impact. Consider everything.

For example, an investor who grew up in Texas retired in Florida. While he kept most of his money in CDs all his life, in retirement he put $20,000 into a scheme that was run out of his birth town and whose employees, before they fled the country, had the same accent as he and knew the street he grew up on and the schools he attended as a child. For that reason, he trusted them when he would never have put money in a similar scheme run out of New York or California or Nevada.