How To Make Money Decisions When The Rules Keep Changing
I keep meeting people who have stopped making decisions about their money. Not because they don't care. Because every few months something changes — or somebody says something might change — and the sensible-sounding response is: I'll wait. I'll see what happens. I'll decide when things settle down.
Except things never quite settle down.
So this is about how you make financial decisions when the rules keep moving. Not what the rules are — I'm not going to pretend I know what any government, market or economy does next. I don't. This is about deciding without needing to predict all of that correctly first.
Why this is rarely a maths problem
I spent years working in banking, and then nearly five years coaching entrepreneurs through a major UK bank's business accelerator. I've personally coached more than 250 people.
One of the biggest things that taught me is that money decisions are very rarely only about the maths. Sometimes the maths is the easy bit. The difficult bit is us — fear, habit, avoidance, wanting certainty, wanting somebody to say this is definitely the right thing to do. And when things feel uncertain, all of that gets louder.
The pattern I see again and again
Something might change. The thing you've been doing suddenly feels less safe. You start questioning the whole strategy. And before anything has actually happened, you're considering quite a big decision purely to make the uncertainty go away.
That might be selling investments. Selling an investment property. Moving everything into cash. Abandoning a business strategy. Putting off a career or income decision because now doesn't feel like a good time.
Sometimes changing strategy is absolutely the right thing to do. But there is a very large difference between:
"The facts have changed, so I've reviewed my strategy."
and
"I'm frightened the facts might change, so I'm going to blow the strategy up before I know."
Those are not the same decision.
You can turn a possible problem into a real one
This is the bit I think people miss.
If you sell something for less than you paid for it, you've crystallised a loss. If you get rid of an asset that was part of a long-term strategy, getting back to exactly where you were might be expensive, or impossible. If your decision carries tax, fees, transaction costs or penalties, those still count — you don't get to discount them because you were frightened when you made it.
And if you abandon your strategy every time the environment gets uncomfortable, you never really had a strategy. You had a plan that worked while nothing scared you.
What the landlord data actually shows, and what it doesn't
Property gives a useful real-world example, and I want to be very clear before I use it: I am not telling anybody whether to keep or sell an investment property. Sometimes selling is the sensible decision. If the numbers don't work any more, look at them. If your goals have changed, look at them. That's arithmetic.
But there's some interesting data in the government's English Private Landlord Survey. In 2024, 31% of landlords surveyed said they planned to reduce the size of their portfolio over the following two years. 16% were planning to sell all of their properties. And among those planning to reduce or leave, 44% cited forthcoming legislative changes as one of the reasons.
Things that had not happened yet.
That does not mean those landlords were wrong. Some may have been completely right. Some will have had five other good reasons. The survey doesn't tell us whether any individual decision was sensible.
What it does show is that people make substantial financial decisions partly in anticipation of rules that may change. And the bigger and harder to reverse the decision, the more careful I think you need to be about what is fact, and what is fear about what might become fact later.
Selling out of fear is two decisions, not one
You see the same problem with investments. If you sell because you're frightened about what might happen, you haven't made one decision. You've made two. When do I get out — and then, when do I get back in?
Nobody rings a bell. Nobody appears on television to announce that uncertainty has officially finished and you may now resume your long-term plans. So what exactly are you waiting for? A market that feels safe? A month where nobody says the word crisis?
By the time you feel completely comfortable again, the situation may already have changed. That doesn't mean never sell. It means fear about what might happen is not, on its own, a strategy.
The one distinction that does the work
How reversible is the decision?
Some decisions are easy to change. How much you put aside each month. A scenario you've run but not executed. Something you can test, adjust, or gather more information on. Get it wrong and you change course. Annoying, maybe. Recoverable.
Others are difficult, expensive, or impossible to put back as they were. Selling an asset. Giving away a substantial sum. Exiting something you spent years building. Making a major commitment with a significant cost to get out of.
Those deserve a much higher evidence bar.
The five questions
If you're making a money decision because something feels uncertain, this is the process I'd use.
What exactly am I afraid is going to happen? Not "everything's uncertain" — that isn't specific enough to decide from.
What am I considering doing because I think that's going to happen? Name the decision, not the worry.
What evidence do I have today? What has actually happened and is confirmed — versus what have I heard, read, assumed or imagined might happen. Those don't deserve equal weight.
If I'm wrong, can I undo this? Don't stop at yes or no. What would undoing it cost? Money, tax, fees, time, buying something back at a different price, two years rebuilding what you dismantled in a weekend. Put a cost on being wrong.
What does doing nothing cost me? This one gets forgotten constantly. Waiting isn't free. Indecision is still a decision. Leaving the money where it is is a decision. Keeping the property is a decision. Not building the buffer, not dealing with the debt, not asking for the pay rise — all decisions.
So the rule underneath all of it: reversibility doesn't tell you what to decide. It tells you how much proof you should need before you decide.
The limit of this, stated honestly
This does not protect you from governments changing rules, or markets falling, or tax. It doesn't guarantee your current strategy stays the right one. Sometimes the facts change and you should change with them. I'm not selling you control you don't have.
What it does is help you separate "the situation has changed and I need to respond" from "I hate feeling uncertain and doing something big would make me feel better." Those two feel identical when you're anxious. They are not the same.
When uncertainty becomes convenient
There's a version of this I see constantly in coaching. Someone says they can't plan because they don't know what the government's going to do. And when we dig in, most of what they haven't done has nothing to do with the government.
They don't know what comes in and goes out each month. There's no buffer. They haven't checked whether the assets they already own still make sense on today's numbers. The debt is still sitting there. They haven't asked for the pay rise, or put their prices up, or had the conversation with their partner about what they're both actually building. Some aren't clear what financial freedom would even mean for their life rather than somebody else's.
None of that requires you to know what's in the next Budget.
And this is where uncertainty gets comfortable. If the problem is out of my control, I get to wait. If the problem is that I don't know my numbers, or I know something isn't working and don't want to decide - some of the responsibility comes back to me.
I don't say that judgementally. I've done my own versions of it. Human beings are extraordinarily good at finding sophisticated reasons why today isn't quite the day to do the uncomfortable thing.
If you take one thing from this
Don't try to get better at predicting the future. Get better at making decisions that survive you being wrong about it.
Move more easily on things you can undo. Be slow and boring about the things you can't. And keep checking that uncertainty about what you don't control hasn't become an excuse for avoiding what you do.
The people I see cope best with changing rules aren't the ones who predicted everything correctly. They're the ones who built something that didn't need every prediction to be right in order to keep working.
If several things feel messy at once
If you're reading this thinking you've got seventeen things that feel messy and no idea which to deal with first, that's exactly why I made the Freedom Leak Map. It's free.
It takes you through four places freedom leaks out of your life — money, time, energy and opportunity. So you're not only looking for where you're overspending, but at the decisions you're delaying, the opportunities you're missing, the things you're tolerating, and the assets or skills you aren't using. Then you work out which leak costs you most, and choose one thing to start fixing. Not your entire life by Friday. One thing.
It won't tell you what the government's going to do. It'll show you what's leaking regardless.
And if you've been in a wait-and-see phase, tell me what you've actually been waiting for. I genuinely want to know.
This is education and general discussion. It isn't personalised financial advice.
