Perfectly Optimizing Your Finances vs. Simplicity

Dave and Mark McGrath discuss why keeping your finances simple can be more effective than chasing perfection.

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 If you wanna min max your finances to the nth degree and really optimize the last 1% of that stuff. Be my guest. For me, like, look, I spend my life in personal finance. I’m too lazy to care about that. Like my whole portfolio is XEQT and some variation of one. I don’t bother with asset location, putting us stocks in my RRSP and Canadian in it, and I don’t care.

I just hold everything in the same place and I don’t have to think about it. I don’t even know what my portfolio is doing. I never have to check. I never have to rebalance. It’s just I don’t even know what the market is doing most days.

Yeah, I’m the same way. By the way, I follow my hockey pool 20 times more closely than I follow my investment accounts. Uh, Uh, in fact, the, when I go and do interviews in the media and they say, what do you think about the market right now? I often don’t know what the market’s been doing the last several days because why would I, I, I’m not going to make any changes to my overall strategy.

So monitoring on an ongoing basis doesn’t make much sense I find it interesting by the way, listening to you talk about people who are going, you know, insane to optimize to the 0.001 level. Do you not think it’s interesting that most of us who are, you know, perceived to be experts in the field, don’t tend to be like that? We do a very, very good job. We’re not careless, we’re not reckless, but we’re not obsessive compulsively nutty about the 0.01 either.

It’s interesting. Your clip came on my radar recently just flipping through, through TikTok.

Said something about. I was like a Jedi mind trick or something. How like the more and more you kind of intro, the more complex things get. I think he said the more you kind of wanna revert to simplicity. And I thought that was a pretty eloquent way to think about it. And I’ve actually really recognized this in myself almost in the past, like three years, where for most people it’s like, get the big things right.

Don’t worry about the other stuff. Go live your life. Right?