We are encouraged to outsource our financial decisions to “experts.” If we give control of our assets to others, relying on others to manage our financial affairs, then we might set ourselves up for failure. One managed account organization poses these three questions:
- Do I know how to manage my own investments?
- Do I want to manage my own investments?
- Do I have time to manage my own investments?
These questions are posed to you so that you will feel the need to outsource your investments to a managed account. However, you can choose to invest in ways that are simple. They exist, but not widely advertised because the fees are not high.
If we do not engage in the investment process, we disconnect from our life foundations of self-sufficiency, work ethic and financial literacy.[i] For the very wealthy, this is how they go from ‘shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves’ in three generations.
Using AI is a way to outsource thinking. There is an MIT study[ii] that subjected those who used AI intensively for 4 months to MRI testing to see how it affected their capacity for critical thinking. The study concluded that it shut the brain down in those areas that used to grapple with critical thinking. Now, instead of AI being an extension of you, you become an extension of it. No one knows yet if those areas of the brain can be reactivated. Or if people would want to put in the effort to reactivate their creative capacities once they were hooked on an easier solution.[iii]
When I was starting out in married life, I thought that outsourcing major financial decisions was a great idea! I didn’t know anything about money. Let my financially savvy husband make the decisions. Let the trust company invest the funds, if my husband died and I was the recipient of a $1 million insurance policy. Then Stan took me to the U.S. Trust Company to get me acclimated to the financial world. The representative did not waste any time on me. He did not view me as the client. I knew then that I had to become financially knowledgeable.
What makes our company, Scarsdale Investment Group unusual is that we ask our clients to engage in the decision-making process. It is legally called Assets Under Advisement (AUA). We educate our clients about bonds. We do not act without their approval. We represent you in the bond markets. Brokers represent the house, though they pose as your advisor. We also have the lowest fees. Contact us to find out more.
Stan and I wrote Income Without Taxes: An Insider’s Guide to Tax-Exempt Bonds – our first book. This is a how-to book which describes how individual investors who have no previous knowledge about bonds can buy their own individual bonds themselves, without the help of an advisor.
This book sold more than 70,000 copies and two years later resulted in the launch of our bond business, the Scarsdale Investment Group, Ltd. We also wrote four more books about bonds. The latest is Bonds: The Unbeaten Path to Secure Financial Growth, 2nd edition. Check out our books on bonds!
[i] James Grubman, Ph.D. Strangers in Paradise: How Families Adapt to Wealth Across Generations. 2013.
[ii] Nataliya Kosmyna, et. Al. “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task,” Media.mit.edu, June 10, 2025.
[iii] “How AI changes the way you think,” The Economist, July 19th 2025.