Turning off the financial news addiction

Carl Richards writes for Investment News about turning off the financial news spigot.

Richards writes, “Unless they’re concerned with following the latest changes in tax law, there’s little value to be had in much of what passes for financial journalism. It’s a lot of noise dedicated to grabbing our time and attention. But for most clients, it’s just distracting them from everything else that should be more important to them.

“There’s a valuable role for us to play as real financial advisers, that of the human curator. Do our clients really need to spend hours sorting through their feeds and trying to decode the headlines or could we be doing that for them? What should they be paying attention to?

“For instance, one friend shared with me that when he turned off the financial news spigot, he calculated that he saved two to three hours every night. Do the math and it ends up being a savings of 40 or so days each year. Even if you cut that in half, it’s still 20 more days in a year to do something else besides trying to translate the noise masquerading as financial news.”

Read more here.