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Optomizer vs Satisfier

Optomizer vs Satisfier


Here I am satisfying my need to consume university-priced pitchers at a local brewery last night at book club. It was a $20 night out, which never happens!

I am not an Optimizer. Granted, I LOOOOOOVE reading blogs that get into the weeds with detailed tax, investment and savings strategies but I am not that person. I enjoy a rousing debate and when personal finance keeners bring out the calculators and start fighting, I make some popcorn and watch. But I am not that person.

I don’t budget down to every penny. I don’t know the asset allocation of every ETF available on the market. I just see which ones have the average allocations that represent the markets/indexes/regions I want (and the fees I don’t) and then I push the BUY button. I know that this makes some people deeply, deeply uncomfortable.

But here is the thing: I know SO MANY PEOPLE who just walk into a bank/sign up for a salesperson to take 1% of their money (whether they are good at making YOU money or not) and then they just wipe their hands and walk away. They feel confident that a “professional” is taking care of their money when they are truly getting scammed.

Conversely, I know people who are DOING NOTHING. Scared of the stock market, they let their cash accumulate in accounts where their cash is being slowly eroded by inflation. Even sticking that into a 5% GIC would be at least doing something that would at least be stemming the hemorrhage of your buying power to inflation.

Both of these kinds of people are doing the exact same thing: they don’t trust themselves enough to learn the basics and they are scared that they will lose everything. So they make the most inefficient decisions possible because it feels comfortable.

Don’t get me wrong, I think money psychology is super important. You have to make decisions that help you sleep at night. But I feel like you can only make those decisions if you have all of the facts and oftentimes people don’t. They try and play it safe because they don’t know (or don’t want to learn) the basics of how to invest and in the process they allow themselves to fall victim to a predatory financial sales community or lose their money as it gets eroded by inflation over time. Sure, it may feel good to be stagnant and/or ignorant today but what this means is that you will lose your access to a secure or even bountiful retirement. The longer you wait, the more you lose.

People often get the impression that I know the ins-and-out of the stock market because I do enjoy discussing it, either in our Money Mondays group or with friends. But in reality I only really know how the basics work. And more controversially, I truly believe the following things:

1 – Most Financial Advisors don’t know more than you could learn on your own by reading a few books. Still scared? Get a fee-only FA. They are worth the money to help build you a plan without draining your nest egg.
2 – The average person doesn’t need to know much more than the basics of the stock market (although, I do recommend they learn as much as possible!).
3 – Inflation is like losing money every year. We tend to feel good psychologically if our $100000 stays at $100000 from one year to the next. But, realistically you can only buy $97000 worth of goods this year with that money when inflation is at 3%. That’s actually a $3000 loss that you don’t see.

Things that you do need to know:
1 – Invest regularly, preferably you can set it up to automatically fund your accounts and then forget it(ish).
2 – How ETFs/Index funds (and maybe even Robo-Advisors) work.
3 – Know what tax shelters are available to you in your country and learn how to use them (ie: retirement accounts)
4 – Only look at your accounts once a year.

Some people are on the cusp of having a coronary just reading that. But I am not an Optimizer, I am a Satisfier. I am satisfied to point myself in the right direction and then hobble down that road. I am not sprinting to some ridiculous goal of making my bajillions on stock tips, I am looking to make a decent decision (buying the index for an average return) while minimizing my losses (fees, inflation). The average return of the S&P is 11+% (1957-2021) and the average return of the TSX is 9+% between (1960-2020). So logic dictates what Jack Bogel introduced to the world: if you buy the entire thing as an index fund, your returns will follow the market.

Of course, I am simplifying things (and nothing works out 100% of the time) but that is the beauty of it: it’s that simple! You don’t need through reams of company reports and a deep knowledge of how every company you buy works. You just need to know that you are heading down a road that even when it gets winding and rocky (when the average return is down, like last year) will eventually take you to where you are going. As a satisfier, that is good enough for me. You give up huge gains for steady growth and the ability to sleep at night.

I do my budget the exact same way. I lay out all of the mandatory things (bills, savings) and set it up to come out of my account as much as I can. Whatever is leftover is mine to do with what I want. I don’t do a zero-budget where every single penny has to be allocated like an Optimizer would. Being a Satisfier, I just have to be concerned about my obligations and then the rest is mine to toss around. Of course, I am frugal in many ways (how does a green bean know that it is a generic vs name brand green bean?) and that allows me to save more in my day-to-day life on things I don’t care about. But that means I can just allocate more to my more expensive habits, like travel.

“BuT tUcKeR, aRe YoU sAyInG pEoPlE sHoUlD bUy InVeStMeNtS tHeY dOn’T uNdErStAnd?”

No. I am saying that they only need to know the basics, not become experts*. Historically, over time, the stock market always goes up**. If the bottom falls out of the entire economy, we won’t even have to worry about our investments because we will need to grab our leather thongs and fire guitars and wander out into the Mad Max desert.

If you are still worried, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE read JL Collins’ book, The Simple Path to Wealth which will give you more info to change your life than any other book out there.

*I am not a Financial Planner nor do I play one on tv. Quite frankly, they’re probably acting too.
**It doesn’t mean it always will in the future but again: we’ll have bigger problems if it comes to that…

The History of work & the fallout

The History of work & the fallout

On our flight back from Puerto Rico in March, I ended up watching a documentary on overwork. It’s a very basic overview on the issue but I found it a good primer. It’s only 50 minutes long and you can find it online here:



Until I was diagnosed in 2018 I ran a blog that was loosely based on early retirement. Even before that, I had a livejournal that was personal but that also discussed frugality and Simple Living. I think I was lucky in the fact that when I was 18 years old and poor as shit, I came across The Tightwad Gazette which led me to Your Money or Your life – the de facto standard on early retirement. Since then, it was my goal to work as little as possible, save as much as possible and hopefully be out of the rat race fairly early in life.

I mean, GOAL ACHIEVED! C’mon, you HAVE to laugh: the universe has a cruel sense of humour.

(I have already discussed this origin story in this post if you are interested in the long version)

Of course, I would have loved to have continued working and been able bodied for a long, long time but given that this wasn’t an option, being able to keep some semblance of a salary plus benefits was a close second. As Tyrion Lannister said, “If you’re going to be a cripple, be a rich cripple.” While I’m not rich, I am also not struggling which is a gift.

So once we adapted to this we started working on Mr. Tucker’s escape from work but then he changed his mind. Since then, he’s received a promotion with a substantial raise, which is great considering how much inflation we’ve seen lately (and our appliances are dropping like flies, which is a post in itself).

Still, I am still interested in the idea of early retirement and working less because I feel it’s something that our communities (and the society at large) as well as the environment need. I think it’s absolutely bonkerstown that we can’t figure out how to make permanent part-time work…work. It’s interesting to watch Canada move towards universal dental care in the next couple of years with universal pharma care maybe not far behind it. These stressors are what make people panic about not working full time even though if more people worked part time there would be more work for everyone. Of course, since it’s an employees market right now, there may be room to negotiate these better hours for people.

The pandemic has really shone a light on how much we are stuck on that idea of workplaces as factories. There has been a battle between employees and employers over the past two years and despite the success of WFH some people still want to go back to the office. Employees who’ve generally enjoyed their time and money back from not commuting, not buying food out, not buying work-related clothes would like keep some flexibility in working from home. Employers on the other hand are still stuck in this 9-to-5 panopticon office mentality where they feel everyone should “put in their time.” The problem is that studies have shown that for knowledge work, it’s mostly task-based, not time based and that not all hours of the day are productive ones. It seems to me that if you are getting paid for your education, experience and output, that it is completely backwards to treat the workday like a factory you have to punch in and out of.

Of course, the flipside is that a lot of knowledge workers work in tech and tech has a vested interest in you sitting at your desk for as long as possible. People lauded Google for supplying their employees with such benefits as free meals, in-house doctors, hair cuts, oil changes etc. but as a friend who worked there once said to me, “Do you know why they do that? Because if you need to go to an appointment, that is a couple of hours of you not going “ticky-ticky” on your keyboard for the company. It’s cheaper to provide these services to employees to ensure they aren’t away from their desks for too long.”

In Ontario, where I live, they treat knowledge work like factory work – with the exception that there is no overtime pay for certain workers: IT, law, accounting, medicine and the entertainment industry. Also of note, many manual labourers who work in agricultural settings such as growing mushrooms and various other plants and trees for the retail trade (which is usually piecemeal work done by labourers brought into Canada on agricultural visas). Oh, and of course teenagers. So I question the factory model of “putting in the hours” when it’s clear that the output should be the yardstick of successful work.

But watch the video. I found it interesting and I especially enjoyed David Frayne’s The Refusal of Work for more comprehensive introduction to work theories. My only wish is that he had explored more of the case studies in the second half of the book.

* * *

I ended up taking out some of the books written by the interviewees of this documentary as well. So far, I have received:

– Team Human by Douglass Rushkoff.
– The Refusal of Work by David Frayne.
– McMindfulness by Ronald Purser (which I haven’t started yet).

I haven’t read anything by these folks also featured but will in the future:

– George Monbiot (whose website seems to have some interesting blog posts).
– Guy Standing who writes a lot on Universal Basic Income (UBI). A list of his books can be found on his website
– Jason Hickel who focuses on global inequality etc. website.
– I’ve seen a lot of Carl Honoré’s work because his books are pretty popular. His website.
– Faiza Shaheen has a book coming out in 2023 titled Know Your Place: how society sets us up to fail.
– Grace Blakely who writes about leftist politics in books and for the New Statesman
– Bredan Burchell (who hasn’t really written anything recently but is a professor at Cambridge).

People I couldn’t find any info on:
– Margaret Anderson, University of Michigan