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Welcome to the latest edition of the Healy Wealth Management newsletter, your monthly guide to navigating the financial complexities of life.
Let us know your thoughts. And if there’s something that could benefit a friend or family member, please send it their way.
Every couple has their own way of managing money. Some keep their finances separate, while others combine everything. At Healy Wealth Management, we generally encourage couples to approach their finances as a team.
Even in households where financial decisions are shared, it is common for one spouse to naturally take the lead. They may pay the bills, manage the investments, and keep track of the details, while the other spouse is comfortable relying on someone they trust.
That arrangement can work very well. But we also believe both spouses benefit from having a basic understanding of their financial picture and knowing where to turn if circumstances suddenly change.
In this week’s Real Questions, Honest Conversations, Kathy Healy discusses why financial awareness matters for both partners, even when one spouse takes the lead. She also shares four simple steps couples can take to help ensure that both spouses feel informed, confident, and prepared for whatever life may bring.
Click below to watch the video
I’m not alive, but I can grow.
I don’t have lungs, but I need air.
I don’t have a mouth, but water kills me.
What am I?
A few of our clients don’t own any stocks at all. Only high quality bonds. In these cases, the risk of losing money is extremely small – as long as they hold the bonds to maturity. Because bond prices fluctuate along the way to maturity, there’s still short-term risk. The key to success is patience. Don’t sell when the statement value goes down.
In 2013, one client reacted to a sudden sell-off in the bond market. While she was confident she would get her money back with interest as she always had, when her statement value dropped as a result of the “Taper Tantrum”, she bailed out.
Remember the bond market’s 2013 Taper Tantrum? It happened when Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve Chairman, told Congress that the Fed would begin tapering its bond purchases. This caused the 10-year Treasury yield to jump from around 1.6% to nearly 3.0% over just a few months, a move of roughly 1.4 percentage points.
Her bonds had an average maturity of five years, translating into a price decline of about 7% (5 years multiplied by a 1.4% rise in yields). On a $1,000,000 account, that’s a paper loss of roughly $70,000, even though not a single bond in the portfolio had defaulted, missed a payment, or changed its promise to return full principal at maturity.
The distinction between paper losses and permanent losses is tremendously important for investors to understand. It’s a phenomenon clients rarely internalize until they see it happen on their own statement, experiencing it first hand. Holding a bond to maturity all but guarantees getting your principal and interest back, credit risk aside. But the market value of that bond along the way can swing meaningfully any time interest rates move. Our client wasn’t wrong to be startled. She simply hadn’t been prepared for the difference between “I will get my money back” and “my statement will never show a decline.”
The same distinction applies to stocks. It’s just more pronounced. The market prices of businesses (stocks) are more volatile than bonds because (1) their coupons (company profits) are subject to change, and (2) there’s no maturity date.
If this topic intrigues you, we’re happy to share more about it. It’s a core tenet of a sound investment philosophy. We will analyze your portfolio and offer insights on how it applies to your financial future. Give us a call.
“I have enough money to last me the rest of my life…
unless I buy something.”
– Milton Berle
Picture someone running to find you, out of breath, gasping out news before they’ve even caught their wind. You know instantly, before they say a word, that something urgent has happened. Warren Buffett once described the effect of financial media in similar terms, warning that scary headlines and breathless commentary can rattle the mind, and that an unsettled mind does not make good decisions.
The deeper problem is not the tone itself. It is that almost none of what arrives that way is actually news. Most of it is noise, dressed up to sound urgent. The distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because it is the difference between information that should change what you do and information that should not.
Noise is anything that changes daily, cannot be acted on productively, and says nothing about what a business is actually worth. A single day’s price move is noise. A Fed official’s word choice is noise. A pundit’s overnight prediction is noise. It feels like information because it arrives dressed as information, urgent, specific, delivered with conviction, but it carries no data that should move a long-term decision.
News, in the sense that matters to an investor, is data that changes the facts. A company’s earnings report, its cash flow, its debt load, a genuine shift in its competitive position. That is news. It is rarer, it is quieter, and it almost never comes with an alert.
Financial commentary that treats every session like an emergency is the headline that says “STOCKS PLUNGE” for a 1.5% pullback. It is the panel of four people talking over each other about what a single Fed sentence means for your retirement. The tell is not what is being said. It is how it is being said, and how loudly, and how fast. Calm, historical, contextualized analysis rarely gets airtime, because it does not feel like news even when it is. Urgency does, even when it is nothing but noise. Financial media is, at its core, an attention business, and urgency is the product it sells. Most of that product is built out of noise, not news.
Examples
A few patterns show up again and again:
Routine declines treated as crises. Markets fall 1 to 2% regularly, dozens of times a year, as a normal function of how equities work. Watch how often that ordinary movement gets covered as if it were unprecedented. It is noise, not news.
Fed day theater. A single word change in a Federal Reserve statement gets parsed, live, by commentators speculating in real time about what it means, often reversing their own take by the next segment. None of it changes what a well-run business earns.
Mania coverage. Meme stocks, single names riding an AI narrative, anything moving fast enough to generate clicks gets the same breathless energy, just aimed at greed instead of fear.
The recession call cycle. A forecaster calls for recession with total conviction, the call dominates coverage for a news cycle, and then quietly disappears when it does not pan out. Few outlets revisit it, and fewer businesses were actually affected by the call itself.
The Psychology Behind It
There is a reason this works on smart, capable people. A few things are happening at once:
Negativity bias. Human brains are wired to weight bad news more heavily than good news.
Recency and novelty. The newest headline feels more important than decades of historical base rates, simply because it is new and immediate. Novelty hijacks attention from relevance.
Herding. Watching other people react, especially visibly and urgently, creates inherent social pressure. Studies indicate our resistance to being different isn’t a character flaw, it’s hard-wired. Conformity is safe. Alone is exposed.
A real physiological response. Breathless language can trigger an actual stress response, elevated heart rate, a jolt of cortisol, even though the “threat” is a number on a screen. Your body does not always distinguish between financial news and physical danger. It reacts to the tone, not to whether the underlying information is noise or news.
How It Affects Decision Making
The cost of all this is not abstract. It shows up directly in outcomes:
Shortened time horizon. A financial plan built around decades gets evaluated, in the moment, against a single Tuesday headline.
Action bias. Doing something feels safer than doing nothing, even when the data says the opposite is true.
Narrative anchoring. People start making decisions based on whatever story is dominating the news cycle rather than their own plan and their own goals.
Mistaking noise for news. Once urgency is in the room, the mind stops asking whether the information actually changes anything and starts reacting as if it must.
Real financial damage. Selling during a downturn, buying into a mania, or abandoning a sound strategy. These are not hypothetical mistakes. They are the most common ones investors make.
What Actually Matters
If most of what arrives with that kind of urgency is noise, the useful question is not how to consume it more calmly. It is what kind of information is worth paying attention to at all. We think the answer is narrow, and deliberately so.
The last one matters most. A business with real pricing power, a moat that keeps competitors out and customers in, can raise prices when its costs rise and protect its margins when conditions change. That durability is what builds a margin of safety, not just against a bad quarter, but against the macro questions themselves.
Inflation and interest rates dominate the news cycle because they feel universally urgent. A business with genuine pricing power can absorb both. That is precisely what lets us treat the macro headlines as noise rather than news for the businesses we own.
When a business is bought below its value, generates real cash, carries little debt, and holds a durable edge over its competitors, the daily narration on inflation, rates, and the news cycle of the moment simply stops being decision-relevant. The margin of safety is built into the business itself.
How We Approach This
If you are not yet a client, ask whether your advisor has a genuine process built around valuation, cash flow, debt, and competitive advantage. If their answer to preparing for the next downturn is simply “stocks always recover in the long run”, while true over long enough periods, it is also a way of avoiding the harder question: how much downside are you actually being asked to ride out along the way, and does your advisor have a reason for that exposure beyond hoping time fixes it?
If that’s your advisor’s answer, call us for a second opinion.
Passwords remain a weak point in personal cybersecurity. They can be guessed, phished, leaked in a data breach, or reused across too many accounts. Two-factor codes sent to your phone help, but they can still be intercepted through SIM swaps or phishing sites built to look like the real thing.
Passkeys close that gap. Instead of typing a password, you verify your identity with your device itself, a fingerprint, Face ID, or your device PIN. There is nothing to type, nothing to leak, and nothing that works if copied onto a fake site, because a passkey is tied to the real one. A thief would need your actual device and your biometrics, not just a stolen string of characters.
To be clear, passkeys do not replace your passwords. They are simply the better option when a site or app offers one. Keep your passwords as a backup, but wherever a passkey is available, use it. It is one of the simplest upgrades you can make to protect your accounts and your identity.
“I’ve had injuries. But there’s something about actually doing the thing. Not just pretending to do it. That comes through on screen. The audience can feel the difference. They might not know what they’re feeling, but they feel it.”
Harrison Ford – on doing his own stunts.
Answer:
Fire.