Storming The Car-Buying Castle: Deciding When to Hire an Expert

“Buying a car is the art of convincing yourself you got a great deal while the salesman convinces his boss he didn’t give one.”

—Anonymous

A hopeless money pit—that’s what my wife and I ended up with the first time we went car shopping in 2013. After months of inconvenience sharing one car (I know, first-world problems), we approached a used-car salesman at a discount lot in Virginia. The unkempt mullet should’ve been a red flag. Two years later, after enduring no air conditioning on a cross-country summer road trip (PA to AZ), we approached our next auto purchase far more cautiously. This time, I bought a tiny, almost-new hatchback. The dealer representative? My wife’s identical twin. Call it nepotism, but when making a major purchase, it’s good to have someone with your best interests at heart.

Thanks to that decision, I got a tough little chariot that’s admirably endured a decade of fender benders and coffee spills. But alas, the old girl’s starting to show her age. It’s a tight squeeze to fit my two kids (ages three and five), plus their stuff, in the back seat. And, if I’m being honest, I can almost park it under the towering pickup trucks outside my church (it’s Texas, after all). For practicality and, yes, a little vanity, it’s time for an upgrade.

Crossing the Moat of Expertise

“I can’t plan all that—it’s the castle gates, the soldiers… I need a genius. I need the man in black.”

—The Princess Bride

As a financial planner, I’m not worried about negotiating a good interest rate or choosing an appropriate payback period—that’s second nature. But this time, there’s no friendly dealer rep with a vested interest in keeping family reunions from becoming awkward (my sister-in-law is now an at-home parent).

I could take the traditional route: browsing online, reading Consumer Reports, and going for test drives. Some of you might even rehearse polite refusals for pushy sales tactics, reciting them in the showroom like a priest warding off foul spirits (“I’d like to speak to my wife first!”). But does it have to be that way?

The reality is, if I buy a car once every ten years while the person in the branded polo (let’s call him Bob) sells at least one every month, he has what investors call an “economic moat” ¹—a distinct competitive advantage that protects his position, much like a castle surrounded by an artificial river (with or without crocodiles). While an economic moat can take many forms, like a patent or a large piece of infrastructure, in this case, it’s Bob’s accumulated experience and expertise. This “expertise moat” explains why we rely on professionals—realtors for buying homes, lawyers for legal issues, etcetera. ¹

Given my background, I’m also keenly aware of overconfidence bias²—the dangerous cognitive tendency to overestimate one’s abilities, knowledge, or judgment, thereby leading to overly optimistic predictions and decisions. So, who better than a General to help me storm a castle?

The (Other) Eisenhower Doctrine

“The plan is nothing, but the planning is everything.”

—Dwight D. Eisenhower

During my time in the Army, I was introduced to Eisenhower’s task-scheduling tool—a framework for prioritizing tasks by sorting them into four categories:

• Urgent and Important: Do these tasks immediately.
• Not Urgent but Important: Schedule time for these.
• Urgent but Not Important: Delegate these.
• Not Urgent and Not Important: Eliminate these.

This framework was a lifesaver for me circa 2014 as a young lieutenant juggling countless priorities. It’s still a powerful tool in my current life as a middle-aged, bearded financial professional working from a home office. For example:

• Urgent and Important: Fetch my daughter’s new rescue inhaler from the pharmacy.
• Not Urgent but Important: Plan to work on this year’s taxes after the kids go to bed.
• Urgent but Not Important: Order a veggie-lover pizza for dinner (I’ll play chef some other night).
• Not Urgent and Not Important: Set aside that mystery novel for my next vacation.

My Corollary to Ike’s Matrix

“An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”

—Benjamin Franklin

For my car-buying situation, I realized I needed to modify Ike’s approach to address the issue of time-and-expertise imbalance. Enter my new creation, the Expertise Decision Matrix:

• High Frequency, High Complexity: Become an expert.
• High Frequency, Low Complexity: Automate the task.
• Low Frequency, Low Complexity: Just do it.
• Low Frequency, High Complexity: Hire an expert.

How does it work? As a financial advisor, I face complex financial questions daily, and the long-term well-being of others (not to mention my own family’s) depends on consistently making the right decisions. Since financial planning is a high-frequency, high-complexity activity in my life, it’s worth the constant effort to be an expert.

On the other hand, my home isn’t terribly large, so it doesn’t make budgetary sense to use a professional cleaning service more than once a month (a small luxury that helps us manage stress). But between young kids, a dog, and my tendency to forget I’m still wearing shoes, our floors are in constant need of sweeping. A modestly priced robot vacuum has been a perfect solution for handling this high-frequency, low-complexity chore.

Some tasks, however, aren’t worth automating or outsourcing. When a lightbulb goes out in my living room ceiling (a rare event thanks to LEDs), I just grab a stepladder and handle it in ten minutes. That’s a low-frequency, low-complexity task.

What about low-frequency, high-complexity tasks? For removing teeth or replacing toilets, most people wisely hire a professional. And although I’ve made my fair share of ill-conceived DIY home repairs, I’ve never attempted oral surgery on anyone—unless you count “helping” my brother lose a baby tooth when we both were kids.

Conclusion

“A partnership built on trust will always outperform one built on profit.”  —Anonymous

Likewise, I hope you’ll consider the value a fee-only financial advisor can provide for your low-frequency, high-complexity money decisions—such as college savings, retirement planning, life insurance, and tax strategies. At Bastion Fiduciary, we build lasting relationships based on trust—just like relying on a knowledgeable close relative when buying a car. We approach every decision with your best interests at heart because your success is our success. I help engineer comprehensive plans tailored to each client’s goals—leveraging expert contacts when needed and never accepting compensation from anyone but the households we serve. And finally, if I ever grow a mullet—I promise it’ll look at least as good as MacGyver’s.

Sources

^{¹ Segal, Troy. “Economic Moat Definition.” Investopedia. Last modified June 26, 2023. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/economicmoat.asp.}

 ^{² Investopedia. “Overconfidence Bias: Overview.” Last modified July 25, 2023. https://www.investopedia.com/overconfidence-bias-7485796.}

 ^{³ Center for Management & Organization Effectiveness. “The Eisenhower Matrix.” CMOE. Accessed January 22, 2025. https://www.cmoe.com/blog/eisenhower-matrix/.}