There’s an assumption running through financial services that complicated means sophisticated. A portfolio with twenty holdings must be smarter than one with six. Four custodians must be safer than one.
We believe the exact opposite. In wealth planning, simplicity is what makes everything else work.
Complexity shows up whether you invite it or not
Almost nobody sets out to build a complicated financial life. It accumulates on its own. You change jobs and leave a retirement plan behind. You inherit an IRA. You open a brokerage account for one purpose and never get around to closing it.
Consider how much people move around. Americans born between 1957 and 1964 held an average of 12.9 jobs between ages 18 and 58, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Every one of those jobs that came with a retirement plan left something behind to track.
By the time someone sits down with us at age 60, the complexity isn’t a strategy. It’s often a “hot mess.”
More options can lead to fewer decisions
There’s a striking piece of research on what happens when a financial decision gets simpler. Economists at Stanford, Yale, and Harvard studied employers who let workers join the retirement plan by accepting a pre-set contribution rate and investment mix, rather than building both from scratch. Enrollment rose 10 to 20 percentage points.
Nothing was taken away. Every investment option employees had before was still on the menu. The only thing that changed was how hard the decision was to make.
We see the same thing in families with scattered finances. When there are eleven accounts and multiple strategies, no one wants to open the statements. Avoidance isn’t a character flaw. It’s a predictable response to a system that’s hard to look at.
Complicated doesn’t mean better results
Complexity often gets sold as an edge. The scoreboard doesn’t support that.
S&P Dow Jones Indices tracks how actively managed funds perform against their benchmarks. In 2025, 79% of them trailed the S&P 500 in the large-cap U.S. stock category. In the same report, 76% of global equity funds and 82% of general investment-grade bond funds also fell short of their benchmarks.
Those are one year’s numbers, so read them as one data point rather than a verdict. Still, the direction is consistent enough to raise a fair question. If the added complication isn’t reliably buying performance, what is it buying?
Every layer carries a cost
Each piece you add to a financial life comes with a price attached. Another fund, another expense ratio. Another product, another commission. Another account, another set of fees.
The SEC’s own math shows what that does over time. Take $100,000 growing at 4% a year for 20 years. With a 0.25% annual fee, it’s worth roughly $208,000 at the end. With a 1.00% fee, it’s worth roughly $179,000. Same market, same period, same starting point. That difference is about $29,000.
That gap is the price of complication when complication isn’t earning its keep.
Simple plans are easier to keep straight
There’s an administrative case here too, and it isn’t small.
Say you’re taking required minimum distributions. If you own several IRAs, the IRS lets you calculate the required amount for each one, add them up, and take the whole total from just a single IRA. Employer plans work differently. A 401(k) or 457(b) distribution has to come out of that specific plan.
Miss one, and the tax on the amount you failed to withdraw can run 25%. It drops to 10% if you correct the shortfall within two years. Someone holding three old 401(k)s has three separate opportunities to get that wrong, every single year.
Someone who tidied things up has fewer.
The same logic applies to beneficiary forms, tax documents, and rebalancing. Fewer moving parts means fewer places for something to quietly go wrong.
What simplicity looks like
Simple doesn’t mean thin. A simplified plan can still be globally diversified, tax-aware, and tightly aligned with what you’re trying to accomplish.
In practice, it usually looks like this. Fewer accounts, held in fewer places. One written plan instead of four partial ones. An allocation you could describe out loud in about a minute. Beneficiary designations you can review in a single sitting.
Here’s the test we like. Could your spouse, or whoever eventually settles your estate, pick this up cold and understand it? If the answer is no, the plan may be more complicated than your life requires.
The advantage is in what gets followed
Simplicity isn’t easier for us. Building a clean plan out of a messy one takes more work up front.
The advantage is yours. A plan you can see the shape of is a plan you’ll stick with when markets get loud. It’s a plan you can hand to someone else without a two-hour explanation. Complicated plans tend to get abandoned. Simple ones tend to get kept.
In a field that keeps adding layers, the family that can explain its own financial life has an edge over the one that can’t.
