narayan
Joining the chorus of umpteen “Best” awards the financial media has concocted over the years, I am announcing the creation of the Annual “Realie” Award.
The Realie honors someone for their contribution to making retirement better for real retirees. Unlike the industry’s other awards, this one is the ultimate in understatement (i.e., cheapness), coming as it does from a retired financial writer. The Realie comes with no award dinner, no cup, plaque, or gilded tchotchke, and certainly no money — for the winner, me or Wealth Management, which didn’t know anything about the award until this moment. So, drum roll, please. …
The winner of the 2026 Realie is Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning at Morningstar, for her November blog post, “The Case for a ‘Good Enough’ Portfolio.”
The gist of Christine’s argument is that it’s more than okay if your portfolio isn’t perfect. She explains how she has come to see that people tend to fall into one of two camps when it comes to investing, based on their emotional and intellectual approaches: They’re either maximizers or “satisficers.”
Portfolio maximizers, or optimizers, tend to enjoy in-depth explorations of investment research and learning the best ways to create a financial plan and manage a portfolio. For them, the more information, the better. They have the mindset of engineers.
“Satisficers” are different. Benz explains that the term, coined by economist Herbert Simon, is a hybrid of “satisfy” and “suffice.” For satisficers, okay is fine.
“When making choices,” she wrote, “satisficers are looking for rather than the best possible one. I’ve been thinking that we don’t spend enough time urging people to place themselves on the maximizer/satisficer continuum.”
She suggests that advisors ask their clients—and have clients ask themselves—whether they prefer perfect or good enough when it comes to decisions about asset allocation, investments, savings and spending. Giving them a little data-supported nudge to go in the satisficer direction, she said, has the potential to save people a lot of time and money.
“If I had realized that I wasn’t really a maximizer earlier, for example, I wouldn’t have wasted any time trying to track our household’s spending to the penny in an effort to figure out our budget,” she wrote. “I would have moved straight to the method we use today, reverse budgeting, which simply means that you set up automatic savings contributions and any money left over is yours to spend. Do I know exactly how we’re spending our money? No. Does it matter? Also, no.”
Bravo, Christine!!
I think your “let’s not go crazy” point of view is most welcome and a great antidote to the widespread anxiety among retirees and near-retirees about making big mistakes in retirement planning. Many people already feel like financial fools, who doubt their ability to take action themselves without adopting a monk-like devotion to studying financial material so as not to ruin their future. Alternatively, while the never-ending messages about the need for professional financial planning are well-intended, they also encourage the idea that somewhere, somehow, someone exists who can deliver the holy grail of a perfect financial plan.
“The ‘right’ answer to a lot of financial questions, including the best asset allocation, the highest safe withdrawal rate, or how to pay the least taxes over your lifetime, will only be apparent in hindsight,” Christine writes. “In the meantime, it’s all a bit of a guess.”
That common-sensical and wise point of view provides a healthy measure of reassurance to those in and approaching retirement. It’s the reason Christine Benz is this year’s winner of the Realie. Congratulations!
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