The year to make no big decisions at all

Both approaches to deferring major decisions work. What differs is what they cost you, and the cost is what this sets out.

Why the advice exists

Bereavement counsellors, doctors and advisers routinely suggest postponing major decisions for a period after a significant event, and the reasoning is consistent. A person in the middle of an upheaval is working with a temporarily altered sense of what matters and what will still matter later.

The decisions that appeal in that state, such as selling a home or leaving a job, are frequently the ones people later regret. The evidence for a specific waiting period is weak, and the general principle is widely accepted across professions. It is a rule of thumb rather than a law, and it is a good default when nothing forces your hand.

Separate what is urgent from what feels urgent

Very few financial decisions genuinely have to be made within weeks, and the ones that do are usually administrative rather than strategic. Notifying institutions, claiming entitlements, and meeting deadlines attached to benefits or probate are genuinely time-limited.

Selling a property, moving country, changing career or deploying a lump sum are almost never as urgent as they feel. Writing the two lists separately is a useful hour and usually shows that the pressing list is shorter than expected. Anything on the second list can be revisited in six months with far better judgement and very little cost.

A holding position still needs setting up

Doing nothing is not the same as leaving everything unattended, since bills, cover and obligations continue regardless. The practical version is a deliberate holding arrangement: essential payments maintained, money somewhere safe and accessible, nothing committed. For a large sum, that means somewhere boring rather than somewhere clever, with the decision explicitly postponed.

The useful part is this: it is worth telling family and any adviser that this is the position, so that suggestions can wait rather than accumulate. A stated pause is much easier to defend than an unexplained silence, particularly when other people are waiting on decisions.

Pressure usually comes from other people

Relatives, agents, employers and occasionally advisers all have reasons to want a decision sooner than you need to make one. Some of that is well meant and some of it is commercial, and both feel the same when you are already depleted.

A useful response is that you are not making decisions of that kind for a period, which requires no justification and ends the conversation. Where someone will not accept that answer, it is worth asking why the timing matters to them.

Anyone pressing an irreversible decision on a household in the middle of a crisis is not the person to take it from.

The exceptions worth acting on

Where money is being lost every month, such as a property costing more than it can be let for, waiting has a real price. Where cover is lapsing, where a deadline for a claim is approaching, or where a debt is accruing at a high rate, act.

On an ordinary week, where someone in the household is unsafe or the situation is deteriorating, delay is not the right advice. These are distinguishable from the general category because the cost of waiting is specific and can be stated. If you cannot state what waiting costs, that is a strong sign the decision can wait.

None of this is a substitute for talking to a clinician if something feels wrong.

Set the date you will revisit it

A pause without an end becomes drift, and drift produces its own set of regrets over a longer period. Naming a month to reopen each postponed question turns avoidance into a plan and makes the pause tolerable. It also helps to write down what the question was, since the framing that felt obvious will have changed by then.

Some of the decisions will have answered themselves, which is one of the arguments for waiting in the first place. The ones that have not will be made by someone in a considerably better state to make them.

Side by side

The takeaway

Write two lists, act on the short one, and put a date against everything on the other.

Small and repeatable beats ambitious and abandoned, almost every time.