It was a Monday morning, grey and damp – much like the mood inside the homicide unit. The detective, weary and sharp-eyed, laid the files across the table. “Seven sins”, he muttered, tapping a gloved finger on a grainy photograph of a man who, despite his expensive watch and Hermès coat, looked utterly defeated.
The crime wasn’t murder; it was self-sabotage. And this man was both perpetrator and victim.
He had done the unthinkable: he’d killed his own financial future, one predictable, ancient sin at a time.
The truth is (all drama-setting doom aside!), as an investment manager, I’ve seen these deadly sins creep into portfolios again and again.
Because the biggest risk in building wealth isn’t the next market crash or inflation spike. It’s the primal, flawed human psychology that often gets brought to the investment table.
At Candour Investments, we believe wealth management is less about forecasting the future and more about managing these seven internal enemies.
So here is our dossier on the Seven Deadly Sins of Wealth – do you see yourself in any of these?
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Sloth: The Sin of Eternal Procrastination
The Sloth does nothing, brilliantly. They spend endless hours “researching” a strategy, but never quite get around to opening that account. They plan to invest when they know just a bit more or when the market is less volatile. The cost of this sin is the most insidious: lost time.
You cannot cheat compound interest. The person who invests R1000 per month from age 25 to 35 will have a better outcome than the person who invests R2000 per month from age 35 to 65. The difference is the Sloth Tax – the high price paid for waiting.
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Gluttony: The Sin of Toxic Complexity
This is the sin of excess knowledge and undue complication. The Glutton gorges on structured products, exotic derivatives, and financial acronyms so dense they could stop a bullet. They believe simplicity is for simpletons.
This investor constantly seeks out the complex, the obscure, and the esoteric to justify a high management fee or their own large intellect. They trade a guarantee of “good” (e.g, index fund consistency) for the promise of “perfect” (e.g. active manager outperformance). They end up with portfolios so complex they need a full-time staff just to understand the statements.
3. Greed: The Sin of the Bubble Chaser
The Greedy has an insatiable appetite for financial noise and are masters of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). They have CNBC blaring, they click on Bloomberg more times than Elon Musk tweets before breakfast, and they’re constantly chasing the hot tip from the podcast host they started listening to last week. They believe the sheer volume of their information intake will give them an edge.
The irony is that consuming all this noise leaves them with less clarity, not more. They end up trading on adrenaline instead of analysis.
“Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.” – Warren Buffett.
4. Pride: The Sin of Superior Intellect
The Prideful investor is the one who believes their IQ is a substitute for discipline. They mistake an educated guess for a prophecy and believe they can consistently outsmart the market.
Pride can make an investor arrogant in the pursuit of gains, and stubborn in the face of losses – often doubling down on a losing hand because admitting error is too painful for the ego.
Many graveyards of finance are filled with smart people who thought they were too good for a boring plan. After all, the market, for all its irrationality and unpredictability, is, and always will be, bigger than you or me.
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Wrath: The Sin of the Panic Seller
The Wrathful Investor inflicts emotional violence on their own plan. It manifests during a market correction when headlines are screaming and fear is palpable.
Wrath can make an investor sell everything at the bottom, locking in losses, and swearing off the market forever. They lash out at the market, the media, and their own advisor, instead of realizing that the price of admission to long-term returns is short-term pain.
They fail to accept that volatility is merely the tuition you pay for compounding.
6. Envy: The Sin of Lifestyle Creep
The Envious are constantly trying to match their peers, convinced that true happiness lies just beyond the next purchase. They’re the ones who acquire a small, unpopulated Scottish island purely for the bragging rights, or outfit their new city apartment with a Cryotherapy Chamber in the main lounge.
This sin is behind lifestyle creep: the automatic upgrade of your spending every time your income rises. They trade security for status, often finding themselves trapped in the “golden handcuffs” of massive debt, despite having a high income. This sin eats away any chance of peace and ensures that true freedom is always out of reach. Creepy, indeed!
As I like to tell my clients: Peace rarely lives where comparison does.
7. Impatience: The Sin of The Interrupter
If the ultimate goal is compounding, the ultimate sin is stopping it. Impatience is the decision to constantly interrupt the magic – by trading too much, by panicking and selling, or by pulling money out for unnecessary consumption.
Impatience ruins more portfolios than any bear market. It’s the belief that the waiting is the boring part, when the waiting is actually the work. The Impatient fail to grasp that the biggest returns arrive in bursts, often following long periods of nothing. They pull the plug, miss the recovery, and then re-enter at the worst possible time. The secret to wealth is to cultivate a love for strategic inactivity.
“The first rule of compounding is to never interrupt it unnecessarily.” – Charlie Munger.
The Final Verdict
So, you may be wondering: what became of the man in the damp interrogation room? The detective didn’t press charges. The man was already self-convicted of Life with Financial Regret – the harshest internal prison to endure. He wasn’t ruined by a recession or a bad stock pick; he was ruined by his inner Sloth who waited too long, the Greedy who chased the wrong idea, and the Wrathful who sold out of fear.
In closing, I’d like to leave you with this nugget:
The most potent tool in your financial arsenal is not a product; it’s your temperament.
You don’t need to be a financial genius to win this game; you need to be a boring, disciplined monk who stays wide awake to your own inner ‘sins’. Have a plan aligned to your values, lock that plan in a drawer, manage your emotions, and let the quiet miracle of compounding work its unassuming-but-powerful magic.
