There is a pattern Deric Ned has watched repeat itself throughout his career in financial services. A person comes in, listens carefully, understands the problem with their current setup, sees a workable path forward, and then leaves without taking any action. Weeks pass. Sometimes months. The plan they agreed on makes sense and sits untouched while the conditions that made it urgent continue to develop.
Deric Ned, founder of Ridgemont Capital in Pasadena, California, has a name for what that person did. He calls it a decision.
“They think doing nothing is safer than making a decision,” Deric says, “when doing nothing is a decision, and it’s usually the wrong decision.”
The Comfort of Standing Still
It’s easy to understand why inaction feels like a neutral choice. When someone delays a financial decision, nothing immediately bad happens. The account is still there. The balance looks the same. Life continues without visible disruption. That experience of normalcy can reinforce the idea that waiting is the cautious, sensible thing to do.
But in retirement planning, time is one of the core variables. The options available to someone at 58 are often meaningfully different from the ones available at 64. Income structures, tax strategies, and risk adjustments all depend on timing. A plan that could have been put in place with room to breathe can become a more pressured conversation a few years later, with fewer options and less flexibility.
“Doing nothing, ‘Well, if I don’t do anything, I’ll be fine because I’m okay today,’” Deric says. “Not making a decision is a decision.”
The math tends to confirm this. Someone who understands their retirement structure needs adjustment but delays action by two or three years doesn’t just lose that time. Depending on market conditions and withdrawal timing, they can lose the compounding benefit those years would have provided, along with the ability to make changes before circumstances narrow their choices further.
A Shift Deric Made in His Own Practice
Deric is candid about having spent years trying to push people across this line. He believed that if he explained the situation clearly enough, broke the numbers down carefully enough, and made the path forward obvious enough, people would act. Over time, he changed his view.
“I used to believe that everybody wants it,” Deric says, “and then I realized that that’s not true. I realized that a lot of people say that they want to learn and they want to understand these things, but they actually have no desire to actually do that.”
That recognition led him to rethink how he uses his time. Rather than continuing to invest energy in people who understood the situation but weren’t ready to move, he shifted his focus toward the ones who were. It wasn’t a cynical conclusion. It was a practical one, rooted in the understanding that his ability to help someone is limited if that person isn’t prepared to take a step.
“I try to be very protective of my time and who I’m spending my time with,” he says. “If I sense that I am helping people connect dots that they already had, then let’s go. I’ll walk you through the minefield. But so many people are afraid of help because they have been conditioned by society to lack trust in humanity as a whole”
What Readiness Actually Looks Like
The clients Deric works best with aren’t necessarily the ones who arrive with everything figured out. They’re the ones who are willing to look at their situation honestly, ask real questions, and follow through on what they learn. That combination, curiosity plus follow-through, is rarer than it might seem.
For people approaching or already in retirement, the practical takeaway is fairly direct. If a financial conversation has raised a concern and a reasonable path forward has been identified, waiting doesn’t reset the clock. Markets move. Tax laws shift. Health changes. The window for making structured, deliberate decisions is not indefinitely open.
Ridgemont Capital’s approach is built around clients who want to understand what they own, why they own it, and what the plan actually is for generating income in retirement. That process takes real engagement from both sides. Deric can build the structure. He can explain the tradeoffs. What he can’t do is want it for someone who hasn’t decided they want it yet.
That part, he has learned, belongs entirely to the client.
