Last week, I wrote a post detailing exactly why I despise bucket systems and complicated drawdown strategies. I shared my dead-simple approach: starting with a 70/30 portfolio and simply selling off the bonds over time.
The reaction from the personal finance community was swift and predictable.
Time and again, the pushback centered on a single word: efficiency. People jumped into the comments to tell me that bonds are a lost cause, that my strategy was woefully inefficient, and that I was leaving equity returns on the table. Why are you doing this? they asked. You could make so much more money if you just optimized.
My answer to them is simple, though it flies in the face of everything we are taught as investors: You are looking at the wrong thing.
I believe the relentless pursuit of financial efficiency is making us miserable. Here is why.
The Myth of the Depleting Portfolio
If you look at the EBRI research study released in May 2026, the data paints a fascinating picture of modern retirement. It showed that one in three retirees reach their mid-80s with their original savings completely intact—or even greater than the day they first retired.
This gets to the heart of a massive behavioral trap. In the financial independence community, our net worth goals are rarely based in absolute reality. Instead, they are built by stacking conservative assumption on top of conservative assumption. We build in massive margins of safety because we need that high valuation to give us the “escape velocity” required to confidently leave our jobs and walk away from an income.
That behavior isn’t mathematical. It is deeply emotional.
But here is the catch: once a retiree crosses that finish line, they almost always have too much money. Based on the EBRI data and countless conversations I have had with financial advisors, the vast majority of these diligent savers are going to die with millions. They will enter their mid-80s with the same, if not more, wealth than they started with.
Yet, instead of enjoying that security, they are spending their golden years crippled by undue stress. They obsess over their asset allocation. They agonize over squeezing out a slightly higher return. They are desperately trying to be perfectly efficient with money they aren’t even spending.
The Emotional Tax of Optimization
When we talk about happiness, we usually agree that it isn’t directly correlated with the numbers in your bank account. True happiness comes from a sense of purpose, deep connections, and a solid sense of identity.
But while money might not create happiness, it can absolutely destroy it by introducing anxiety and stress.
Some people spend hours of their precious time worrying if their retirement strategy is efficient enough. But if happiness is tied to purpose and connection, and anxiety actively detracts from that happiness, then the stress of being “efficient” is a net negative.
In other words: the anxiety of optimization is actively decreasing your happiness. The marginal economic gains you might get from a perfectly efficient portfolio are entirely unnecessary, and they are costing you your peace of mind.
Permission to Be Inefficient
We need to purposefully let go of efficiency.
When we talk about decumulation and drawing down our portfolios, we have to stop worrying so aggressively about our returns and how “perfectly” we are managing our investments.
Perfect is the enemy of good. In personal finance, 80% is enough.
The people criticizing my dead-simple asset allocation aren’t doing it because optimizing will actually help me live a better, more fulfilling life. They are doing it because of a deep-seated anxiety caused by the need to be mathematically perfect.
This anxiety is exactly why books like Die With Zero have become massive cultural phenomena. We have become so overly conservative and worried about our net worth estimations that we literally need a multimillionaire author to lambast us into spending our own money.
The easier solution? Stop worrying so much about the spending, and stop worrying about accumulating more.
If you aren’t going to shoot for a lower net worth number because you need that psychological escape velocity to retire, then you must at least do this: allow yourself to be less efficient in retirement.
Let go of the financial anxiety. Accept a “good enough” yield. Use the money for exactly what it was meant to do for you in the first place—allowing you to relax, have a little fun, and worry just a little bit less.
Did you catch this week’s episode of Earn & Invest (Click to listen)?
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