Afford Anything - Q&A: The Efficient Frontier Was Perfect Until HR Got Involved

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

#577: Kelsey is excited about investing along the efficient frontier, but it feels impossible with the lack of fund options in her employer-sponsored 401k. What’s the best way to deal with this problem? Molly discovered that her rollover from a 401k to a traditional IRA hadn’t been invested in mutual funds and was still in a money market fund. Manually calculating her net worth helped her identify this oversight, and she shares her experience with us. Former financial planner Joe Saul-Sehy and I tackle this in today’s episode. Enjoy! P.S. Got a question? Leave it at https://affordanything.com/voicemail For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode577 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joe, how many funds are in your portfolio? I have eight. Eight fund portfolio. That's it. But, you know, that's the question that's on everyone's mind. How many funds should be in a portfolio? Should it be a two-fund portfolio, four-fund, eight-fund, ten-fund? Is there an optimal number of funds?

Oh, we can answer that. We sure can, because that is a question that one of our callers has. And she also has the question, really the bigger question behind that, what should she do if she has a 401k with a crappy fun selection? Interesting. Right? That's a frustrating and limiting thing when you're dealing with a company 401K. 100%.

The efficient frontier shows you that we should go into XYZ fund, but I don't have that fun. What do I do now? Exactly. We're going to answer a question from a caller who has that dilemma. And within that answer, we're going to be deep diving into how to triple what your portfolio might make over the start. of your life.

Triple. Triple. Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that understands you can afford anything, but not everything. Every choice carries a trade-off. And that applies not just to your money, but to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention to any limited resource you need to manage. This show covers five pillars.

Financial Psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate, and entrepreneurship. It's double eye fire. I'm your host, Paula Pant. I trained in economic reporting at Columbia. every other episode, I answer questions that come from you, and I do so with my buddy, the former financial planner, Joe Sal C-Sci-high. What's up, Joe? Paula, it is snowing in Techercana.

This happens maybe two days a year. Schools are closed. It's a snow day. But you know what? Just like the U.S. Postal Service, there is no snow day for the afford-anything community. We're here. We're excited, and it's going to be a lot of fun. Absolutely.

And we're going to kick off with our first question today, which comes from Kelsey. Hi, Paula and Joe. Thank you so much for all of the discussion around the efficient frontier and how to take that next step to optimize your portfolio after having gotten started with VTSAX. It's been really eye-opening and caused me to do a deep dive into my own portfolio. One question I have, and I would guess that this may be a problem for others, is how to work around limited fund options and employer-sponsored 401Ks. I found my desired asset allocation based on the efficient frontier and the level of risk I'm willing to take. Based on this, I am eight. to move my funds to a mix between a large-cap growth index fund, a mid-cap growth index fund, a mid-cap-value index fund, and a small-cap-growth index fund. However, my 401k does not have all of these as options. I recently switched jobs, so right now I have two 401Ks open, since I have not yet consolidated them. The first 401k offers the S&P 500 and a limited set of Fidelity Index funds. It does not have funds that track large cap growth or either mid-cap growth or value. It does have the Fidelity Small Cap Growth K-6 fund, F-O-C-S-X.

However, it seems better to invest in the Fidelity Small-C-C- Growth Index Fund, F-E-C-G-X, if that were an option. My second 401K only has two equity options, one that tracks the total stock market and another that tracks the S&P-600. Between me and my husband, we have quite a few accounts for multiple 401k's Roth IRAs, HSA's, brokerage account, but my 401k has about one-third of the total. I can't decide if I should, A, invest in the small-cap growth K-6 fund F-O-C-S-X in the first 401k, even though I would have preferred the Fidelity Fund FECGX, and then use other accounts to reach my desired asset allocation, or B, keep my 401K in total stock market, even though that was not part of my desired asset allocation, and then go back to the efficient

frontier to see what it looks like when I require 35% of my portfolio to be in the total stock market. I also had not planned to roll over my old 401k to a traditional IRA because I do a backdoor Roth IRA every year. Really appreciate any insight you all may have about how to navigate the efficient frontier with limited fund options available from employers. Thank you. Kelsey, thank you for the question. And it's a question that a lot of afforders share, which is how do you construct an ideal point? portfolio if your options are limited due to being in employer-sponsored accounts. It's so frustrating when, you know, she's clearly embraced all this work that we've

talked about, Paula, over the last few months and dives in, and she goes to her 401K, and I can just imagine how excited she is, and stuff isn't there. What, what, yeah, exactly. So what do we do? Well, maybe Paula, we need to back up a little bit, don't you think? Absolutely, because, you know, Kelsey, we will answer your question, but we also first want to broaden this out for the sake of everyone who's listening, because we understand that some people who are listening have not been privy to the past few episodes and need a refresher from the beginning of what it is that we're talking about, what is the efficient frontier, what are we optimizing for? And so we're going to establish that for the sake of everybody who's listening. And then we will lead into. to the specific answer to your question, which is what you do in the event that you come up with an ideal portfolio that follows the efficient frontier, but the choices that you have are limited. Absolutely. So why don't we start at the beginning then, I guess, what is the efficient frontier?

How about if we just begin there? Right. And for those of you listening to the audio version of this episode, I strongly recommend that you watch this on YouTube. We're going to put a link in the description because what's about to happen right now is Joe is putting up some slides. Oh, hey. We're going to be looking at some charts. So if you are listening to the audio version, please head over to YouTube, look at the charts as Joe maps this out. Don't worry, though, if you're walking the dog or you're commuting, the YouTube will still

be there for later. And I'm going to try to make sure that we sound out all the slides as much as possible for our audio-only audience. Exactly. All right, Joe, take it away. All right. So this gentleman, Dr. Harry Markowitz, discovered the efficient frontier. He's actually looking at different things. He was helping the U.S. Army with troop movement, is my understanding. But he saw that the efficient frontier is a device which helps you figure out the most efficient way to meet your financial goals. For any journey that we're on, there's a most efficient way. And your money's on a journey to reach your goals.

So he looked at three different factors. He looked at your time frame. How long is it until you're going to have this goal occur, whether it's retirement or a new house or all the different goals that our afforders have? Second, what level of risk? We heard from Kelsey. She said there was a risk level that I was looking for. And third, what return do you need to reach that goal?

So given those three things, and there actually even is a fourth one, Paula, which is tax consideration. So you can even make this based on whether this is going to have the friction of taxes every year or not, because outside of a thing like a 401k or an IRA, something that throws off a lot of dividends is going to be a lot less efficient than something that doesn't. Where inside a 401k or an IRA, you really don't have to worry about dividends because you're not going to have to pay any of those taxes along the way. Right. Tax advantaged accounts are either tax deferred or tax exempt, so you don't really have to worry about it. But if it's a taxable brokerage account, then you can get hit with this tax bill for unrealized gains, which

kind of sucks. So what Markowitz did was he created this grid, this chart, and north-south, he shows returns, low returns at the bottom, and high returns at the top. So that's his X-axis. That's his Y-axis. Sorry, that's this Y axis. That's funny. His X axis, I guess I'm cutting the chase, aren't I? His X axis is risk. So as he sees returns go up, he sees risk go to the right. And of course, that means that if we look at cash and CDs, that's going to be low and left, right? Low return. And then it's going to be left on the risk axis because really no risk in an FDIC insured cash account. But if we look at, let's say, collectibles, collectible things, whether they're trading cards or some of the crazy things people collected over the years. Beanie babies? Beanie babies, right. Those will be way up on the potential return, but also really, really far to the right on the risk scale. I mean, beanie babies, to your point, Paul, at one point worth a gazillion dollars. Right. And now there's a lot of people of beanie babies

to their mom's basement and they're worth nothing. Right. So beanie babies are high risk, high return. So what he did next was he looked at different asset classes, all the different things, large company stocks, small company stocks, U.S. government bonds, international. I mean, he looked at all the different investment types and he put them as different dots on this chart. And what he noticed was if he's got, let's say, 50% large U.S. stocks and 50% corporate bonds. it's going to land somewhere in the middle of the dots. And then Paula, you know, he gets excited. He pours himself a glass of wine. He puts on some berry white because this is very sexy stuff. And he's like, whoa, wait a minute. What does this mean?

This is your efficient frontier fan fiction. This is totally is. He's getting so in the mood. And he's like, wait, but what does this mean? What it means is if his dot is in the middle of the dots, there is a line that there's no dots north of it and there's no dots to the left of it, right? Yeah. What does that mean?

That means what we're all looking for. We're all looking for this one dot that is way up and way to the left. I want something that's high return, no risk. Or low risk. Right. I'm sorry, low risk, yes. I want as much risk as I could take. Right.

super low risk, super high return, it doesn't exist. When you looked at all the factual data, that unicorn, that holy grail is nada. It doesn't exist. There is a most efficient mix of investment. So getting back to that 50-50 split of U.S. large companies and corporate bonds, it means that for all of us, if we have that allocation, we could just move it left to that line that's called the efficient frontier. What does that mean? That means that I am going to get the same exact return over the span of time it takes me to reach my goal, but I'm going to take a lot less risk getting there. My portfolio is going to bump around a lot less, which is really cool. I can sleep better at night. I get the same results with less risk. Sign me up. But if you're sleeping well at night and you're okay with the risk that you've taken, it also says that you could go up. And if you go straight up, well, you'll a different mix of investments in this case. And by the way, if you're watching this, I put some

different investment choices up here. These are just made up for illustration's sake. I'm going to show you later on exactly what the efficient frontier looks like because we're going to build it here later in the show. But I said, okay, maybe it's 30% large U.S. stocks, 10% small U.S. stocks, 10% real estate, 50% bonds. And you are taking the same risk you're taking now, but you're getting a hell of a lot higher return. And if you're sleeping well at night, why wouldn't we do that? Like, why wouldn't we get closer to the efficient frontier? So essentially, just to summarize this for, especially for the audio audience that can't see the visual, we've got a graph that's essentially a giant scatter plot. But if we try to put some shape towards that scatter plot, there is this curved line.

And as you said, Joe, the curved line is shown. shaped such that all of the dots are underneath it and to the right. And by the way, a piece of this research that we've all heard before is the law of diminishing returns. And that line initially goes nearly straight up. It only goes a little bit to the right. But the further out you go, the more it begins to flat line. Right. And so you can try to squeeze more and more juice out of this, but Markowitz proved that sometimes taking a lot more risk is not worth that squeeze. Exactly. So what we're seeing within this scatter plot with the curved line, this curved line acting as the roof of the scatter plot, the ceiling of the scatter plot,

is that Beanie Babies in this instance wouldn't actually make a whole lot of sense because you're so far over on the risk side of the spectrum that you're deep into the law of diminishing returns. Yeah, you could more assuredly get 99.5, let's say, percent of that return, taking a lot less risk. Right. So why not go with a 99.5 and less risk to get it? Exactly.

So that's the concept of the efficient frontier. Now, I plotted Paula two dots, one that's to the left of our imaginary dot and one that is straight up. But truly, and I want to focus on this, that's not where your dot's going to be. where I like to start is what is my goal, what is the time frame, and then what return do I need to reach that goal based on the amount that I'm able to save in my budget? That's going to give you the return that you need, and then that will produce the dot. So I'm not going to do either one of those two things. I'm going to start off with what's most efficient based on my goal, which I believe is

exactly what Kelsey said. She's like, okay, I know the risk I need to take to reach my goal. And so I looked at the efficient frontier. My 401k doesn't have those funds. We'll get back to that in a second. But to go to the next step, a guy named Paul Merriman, who was recently Paula on the show again. Yes, he was on the Afford Anything podcast. I actually flew out to Minneapolis to interview him in person. And we will also link in the show notes to that episode as well. A guy named Paul Merriman has done a lot of the research around funds that are closer to the efficient frontier. It's funny because Jail Collins, who I love when it comes to beginning investors and using the total stock market index, Jail Collins knows his audience really well and knows that, hey, a one fund approach is a way to just get people so they don't panic and they get started. It's perfect to start there. Nick Majuli said it best in his book. Nick said that when you get to roughly $100,000, it makes sense to then look at getting a little more analytical. So what Merriman did was he proved that if we start with where J.L. Collins starts and where

you and I think people should start, which is by the total stock market index, either ticker symbol VTI or VTSAX. A one fund portfolio, VTSAX. When you look at that on the efficient frontier, which anybody can do, you will see that that dot in our scatter chart, there's room to the left of it, meaning there are portfolios that are less risky that historically have gotten you the same return. You can also go up from that, meaning, and this has always been my point, has been you can get a much higher return using more of a merriment approach or even better. I like your own efficient frontier based on your own goals approach than using just VTSAX. So,

whether you invest in the total stock market index or the S&P 500, if you put $10,000 back in 1970 into either one of those two positions and you rode that out to 2022, you would have, and by the way, Paula, think about 2023 and 2024, right? If I had the last two years on here, this number would have been even bigger, but that $10,000 would have grown to $1.89 million given 52 years. What does that mean? That means, Paula, that J.L. Collins is 100% right. When you start out, if you're freaking out about what to invest in, you can invest in just the total market or invest in the S&P 500 and you're going to be okay. Right. You will be okay. You will have enough. For 99% of our audiences' goals, this is a way that you will have enough. Right. Put $10,000 into the stock market in

1970 into VTSAX or the S&P 500, 52 years later, it'll be $1.89 million. That's amazing. You will be fine. Right. Merriman compares that with using a 10-fund portfolio that's closer to the efficient frontier. So he's now looking at being more efficient using 10 funds to do it, $3.74 million. Right. Remarkable. That is. nearly double, nearly double. Now, some people say, well, 10 funds, Paula, that's a lot of work. Merriman heard that. So he had a wonderful gentleman named Chris that he worked with. And he said, Chris, for the people that don't want to invest in 10 funds, can we do this with just four funds? Let's try to get close to the efficient frontier with just four funds. So Chris goes out and

researches it. Merriman's like, oh, this is going to stink. And oops, Chris comes back. And, Chris comes back. and we made an extra $200,000, Paula. With a four-fund portfolio rather than a 10-fund. The four-fund, all-world Merriman portfolio over that same 52 years goes to $3.94 million instead of $3.74 million. Right. And then Merriman starts hearing from other people. Yeah. And I should add, what we're looking at right now is the historic performance from 1970 through 2022. That doesn't mean that the next 52 years,

will be exactly like the last 52 years. Great point. Which is to say that we're not making the claim that a four-fund portfolio is in all cases necessarily going to be better than a 10-fund portfolio. We're not making that case. We're saying, look at the 10-fund portfolio. Look at the four-fund portfolio. These two portfolios, this time span that we're looking at, have resulted in a $10,000, initial investment growing to a final investment of between 3.7 to 3.9 million.

So either one, whether you go for fund or 10 fund, is a great option and certainly a much better option than simply a one fund VTSAX portfolio. Yeah, I love that you make that point because truly the point that I wanted to make when I first brought this up was that getting a little more scientific. can have big results, period. And the thing that we know, and this is why I am more interested in us understanding the efficient frontier than I am, us just purely investing in a merriment portfolio, is because this drifts every year, Paula.

It does drift a little bit. And so if it's planning and not a plan and if we're not static, but we are moving with the efficient frontier a little bit every year, we're going to stay fairly efficient because we know how it works. It's important to know how this works if you really want to get as much juice out of this as you possibly can. I love Merriman's research because it saved me so much time and showing why the juice is there. So Merriman, of course, starts hearing in his head all the pundits again going all world, investing internationally, Paul, I don't think I want to invest internationally. I'm just going to invest U.S. So he looks at Chris again and he goes, Chris, why don't

we do this. Let's see how much it's going to cost us if we just keep this to the United States only over those last 52 years. So he does that and Chris comes back and goes, whoops, it's $4.09 million. We actually made more money by staying in the U.S. with these four funds. Right, rather than an international component. Yeah. And so Merriman goes, okay, well, how this can be like his head hurts, right? This is again, Joe's fantasy fiction. His head hurts. He's like, why can this be? And he looks into it, This is not fiction. This is actually what Paul wrote, was that he dives in.

He goes, oh, most of this historically came from value. So if we're truly looking at the efficient frontier, I'm noticing that there's a lot more value than growth. Now, we're going to stop here for just a second because I want people to know, what's the difference between value and growth if you're new to all this? Let's say Paula's a growth investor and I'm a value investor. Paula looks at the company as a growth investor,

and she's looking at, can this company take over the world? How fast are they going to grow? Can they dominate their market? What are the things that this company's doing that are really a rocket chip to the moon? Right. It's the year 2000 and I want to find Amazon. Right. Yes.

And me, I'm looking at Amazon. And Amazon's a great one here, Paul, because I'm looking at Amazon. I'm like, okay, if we take Amazon and we just trade it for parts, right? We pull it apart and I sell off the pieces like some venture capitalists would do. What would I get for the pieces? Because a value investor truly is looking for that discount, right? The holiday sale or President's Day mattress. Whatever it might be.

I'm looking for that in the stock market. Yeah, the value investor is looking for the undervalued gem. And what's funny is we all know how amazing Amazon did, but you won't find Amazon in value portfolios. Right. And while Amazon did really well, the problem with a growth portfolio is that the swings are much bigger because for every Amazon, there's going to be a lot of overvalue companies that investors are going to bet on that don't do what they think they're going to do. But like huge investors like Peter Lynch have said in the past, he's like, I only need one Amazon to make up for 15 of the non-Amazons. Well, and I should add, that's why there are legendary

investors who are growth investors, and there are legendary investors who are value investors. So if you look at Philip Fisher and Benjamin Graham, right, you've got one is growth, one is value. They are both classic Hall of Fame, you know, eternally remembered for their prowess as investors. And they come from two different philosophies. So you can do well in either camp. We're not claiming one is superior to the other in all instances. But for the average individual investor who is not doing this full time and who is trying to build a portfolio that will give them residual income as you focus on your day job as a teacher or a firefighter or a doctor, for the average person, the average individual investor, a value orientation tends to do better.

historically speaking. Sure. Yeah. Growth investing will get you there. It's going to be a bump of your ride. Right. I mean, and on all the metrics around risk, prove that out. Troll Price, Paula, is a big name of a guy historically who was a wonderful growth investor. Went a long way with gross. Looking at value then. So the next thing that he did, he goes, okay, well, if it's just value that did it, go find me just something that focuses on, value and let's see if we can squeeze more out of this. By going from four funds to five funds now, so he added a fund here, Chris comes back with the research and his five fund worldwide value goes from 4.09 all the way up to $5.34 million. He adds $1.25 million. So by expanding this to a five fund portfolio and reincorporating international equities. But mostly emphasizing value, he has now added another. And then, of course, he goes, okay, well, are we going to lose money if we go US only?

And you guys already know the answer to this. He does not lose money. He goes all the way up to 6.43. He adds another million dollars. And so if we just pause and take a look at the outcomes here, So using this particular historic time period of 1970 through 2022, if we start with an initial investment of 10,000, and we follow J.L. Collins' advice of putting everything into VTSAX. So we have a one fund, VTSAX and chill portfolio. Over this 52-year time span, we have 1.89 million. But over that same 52-year time span with a U.S. all value, we have 6.43 million. So we have triple. tripled the value of the portfolio. And in the spirit of the efficient frontier, again, if you think of that scatter plot with a line that runs up and to the right, we have not only tripled the value of the portfolio, but we have done so without taking on undue levels of risk. We have done so in a risk-managed manner.

And that is, I'm glad you said that because that is definitely the next question. Well, Paul and Joe, how much more risk did we take getting to this portfolio? I dove into Merriman's research on this, and the answer is, yes, there is more risk. During those 52 years, the S&B 500 slash total U.S. stock market index went down 11 of those years. This U.S. All Value Fund went down 12. I don't think anybody's going to look at the difference between 11 losing years and 12 losing years and go, I can't stomach the difference between those two. Forget it. I also know that the worst year for either of those was a negative 37. The worst year for that U.S. all value was a negative 38.8.

So, Joe, what you're saying is that the risk levels are within a rounding error of each other. Yes. If you're in VTSAX right now, talking to everybody who's in VTSAX, I think you're the same person that can stomach the ups and downs of his U.S. all value or any of these portfolies. that we've shown. Let's talk about this, though, because one thing that you and I have heard, Paula, when I started really going on my rant about this, is I have enough money. I have enough. So my question is, what would you do with an extra $4.5 million? You're talking about the delta between the two outcomes. Yeah. What would I do if I had that extra four and a half? Because people, people rightfully so goes, VTSAX will get me there. It will get me there. And this was really the height of

my rant, $4.5 million is going to go a long way toward doing beautiful things in the area that you live. An extra $4.5 million can truly do a ton of good for the people around you. For me, that's really, Paula, what this is all about. Right. Yeah. Exactly. You can, if you feel as though you have enough, you're welcome to give that extra $4.5 million to charity. It's so fantastic. Right. So what we've done up to this point, Joe, is we have a established for the sake of the entire audience, we have established this conversation around what is the efficient frontier and why does it matter? What we need to do next is answer Kelsey's specific question, which is, all right, I absolutely agree that I should have the efficient

frontier in my portfolio. However, I have an employer-sponsored 401K. And I have a limited selection inside of that 401K. Now that we have taken this time to establish the background for the sake of everyone who's listening, the next thing that we need to do is answer Kelsey's question, which is how do I deal with the limitations of my employer-sponsored offerings. And so Kelsey, the answer to that is up next. The holidays are right around the corner, and if you're hosting, you're going to need to get prepared. Maybe you need bedding, sheets, linens.

Maybe you need serveware and cookware. And of course, holiday decor, all the stuff to make your home a great place to host during the holidays. You can get up to 70% off during Wayfair's Black Friday sale. Wayfair has can't miss Black Friday deals all month long. I use Wayfair to get lots of storage type of items for my home. So I got tons of shelving that's in the entryway, in the bathroom. Very space saving. I have a daybed from them that's more.

multi-purpose. You can use it as a couch, but you can sleep on it as a bed. It's got shelving. It's got drawers underneath for storage. But you can get whatever it is you want, no matter your style, no matter your budget. Wayfair has something for everyone. Plus, they have a loyalty program, 5% back on every item across Wayfair's family of brands. Free shipping, members-only sales, and more. Terms apply. Don't miss out on early Black Friday deals. Head to Wayfair.com now to shop Wayfair's Black Friday deals for up to 70% off. That's W. W. W. W. W. F-A-I-R-com. Sale ends December 7th.

Fifth Third Bank's commercial payments are fast and efficient, but they're not just fast and efficient. They're also powered by the latest in-payments technology, built to evolve with your business. Fifth Third Bank has the big bank muscle to handle payments for

businesses of any size. But they also have the FinTech hustle that got them named one of America's most innovative companies by Fortune magazine. That's what being a fifth third better is all about. It's about not being just one thing, but many things for our customers. Big Bank Muscle, FinTech Hustle. That's your commercial payments, a fifth third better. So what should Kelsey do? Well, I want to answer one more question, Paula, which Kelsey's already

navigated, but a lot of our audience probably hasn't. And that is, this is going to take a lot of time and it's going to be complicated. I mean, this all sounds great, sounds scientific. Ooh, it's science. I didn't do that well in science class. I don't think I want to do that. It's going to take a lot of time. Well, Kelsey already knows because I think she went through my training, 15 minutes, and it's once a year for $4.5 million. $15 minutes, $4.5 million. Paula, I think it's 50 minutes, $4.5 million. So good use of time. A tool that will show everybody, and this is where Kelsey's getting hung up is, she went to a place called Portfoliovisualizer.com.

Now there's a big button at Portfolio Visualizer that says get started to read. reach the efficient frontier, you do not want to go to the big button on the left that says, get started. Do not push the big. It's visually dominating. Yes. It's this giant green button that says, get started. And by the way, there's a lot of cool things you can do if you click that button,

but the first thing they want you to do is pay for it. And by the way, there's a lot of great tools here. Portfolio Visualizers, an amazing site worth paying for, but that's not what we're using it for today. Today, we're just going up and to the right. There's a much smaller line of links, and you're looking at the tools button. You're going to open that up, and you'll find the efficient frontier button. You're going to click on that. And that will lead you to a really oblique-looking page that freaks people out.

And we're just going to walk through this just very, very briefly. And as a reminder to the audio audience, just make a note to yourself to watch this on YouTube because you'll be able to visually see this walkthrough of portfolio visualizeder.com. Up at the top with portfolio type, it says tickers. And with all of these boxes, we're only going to focus on one. We're going to focus on that ticker box. We're going to focus on the box to the left as this ticker symbol and minimum weight, maximum weight. Those are all that you're going to need to know for today. You can dig into this even more, but to get the basics and to find your efficient frontier on a less granular level, this is all we need is these four boxes. So hopefully

that reduces our freakout factor when we see this page. We're going to shift that ticker button. We're going to click on that and it says tickers or asset classes. We're going to change it to asset classes. If we change it to asset classes, now on the left, we can then input whatever boxes we want. This is what I used. U.S. large capital. value, U.S. large cap growth, U.S. midcap value, U.S. midcap growth, U.S. small cap value, U.S. small cap growth, international developed outside the U.S. market, X U.S. market, emerging markets, short-term treasury, intermediate term treasury, corporate bonds, reits, and precious metals. You can add in other asset classes if you want, but watch out because one thing I don't like about this free tool

is you're going to have to pay attention when you hit the view button and we're going to get there in a second, you're going to have to look at what time frame it gives you because Paula, on some of these asset classes, for whatever reason, the people at Portfolo Visualizer haven't back tested it very far.

There's other tools I've seen that has. This is the free one that's easiest to use. But if you start getting fancy with some of the other asset classes, it might only give you the last five years. And I will tell you that's not enough time. It just isn't enough time to really see an efficient frontier that matters.

We want that to be 15 years, 20 years, at least to see where we're, what we're looking at. Now, next up is minimum weight. And the reason I want to focus only on minimum weight. And people watching the video will see, I put 5% in each of these because I go, well, okay, you know, I want to make sure that the minimum is not that high. if you fill in anything at minimum weight, it's going to tell the computer, oh, I need to include at least 5% for my number. Whatever number you put in here, it's going to tell you, oh, I have to include precious metals. Oh, I have to include corporate bonds. It is very important that you don't limit the computer by putting a number in minimum weight.

So the only reason I filled this in for this example was to tell you, do not touch this box. So wait, Joe, just to clarify, so the reason that you filled in minimum weights was so that you could tell the afforder community, don't do what I did. Don't do what I did. Right. Because it will say, oh, I have to have short-term treasuries because I've had people, Paula, fill in that box. And I don't know what's going on because it's telling me in this case, I have to have a 13 fund portfolio. Well, it's because you put something in minimum weight. Right.

So what you're saying is don't mandate the program to. give you a certain minimum amount of a given asset class. Make sure minimum weight is zero. Now, the next line is maximum weight. Now, this is going to be really important for this particular time frame. I would also posit that looking at the efficient frontier now is harder than almost any time we've had historically. I've gone back the past 50 years, Paula, and this efficient frontier is giving us more

weirdness than ever before. And I don't know any professional that thinks it's going to continue. What I'm talking about is this. There is one asset class to rule them all, like the one ring in the J.R. Tolkien books, right? One asset, large cap growth, right? Which is why we have the magnificent seven stocks. They are dominating so much that if we don't give it a maximum weight, it's going to say, hey, put all your money in large cap growth, period. Just absolutely do it. Well, think about how ridiculous that is and what that truly does to the science. And do I want to have a portfolio that's invested in one fund? I do not. I don't want to take that risk. So for me, I'm going to cap any asset class at 30%. I don't want to go. I don't want more than 30% of my money in one fund.

You can make that whatever you want, but I don't know any pro that goes over 30%, but you can. So set your maximum weighting. And for the case of what I've built here, 30% is the number that I used. Okay. So minimum zero, maximum 30. Yes. I hope people understand why, though. All right.

Once we've done those, we hit that little blue button on the bottom. And this is where it's exciting. And I actually made a video of me doing this. And you'll see for people that are listening to the audio, I'm just running. this down and it's showing me what investments are on the efficient frontier given those. And now, you'll also notice for some of these, it's showing me some investments at maybe two or three percent sometimes or 14.85, you don't need to be that granular. If it tells you 1485, go 15 percent, right? If it tells you 2 percent, feel free to get rid of it. You'll also notice

that there are dots north of this line. Joe, you said there would be no dots north of the line. Well, Paula, do you know why there's a dot north of this line? Why is that, Joe? Because I said 30%. And what the computer's telling me is, Joe, if you hadn't constrained me to 30% and put it all in large-cap growth, you would have been above the line. And I go, yes, computer, that now has a voice. Yes, computer, I know that, but I'm not going to fall into that trap because what goes

up, comes down, and we've had a hell of a run in large cap growth for the last decade. And I don't want to get caught in that mess, which we know always hits very, very quickly. So I'm not going to do that. Right. But that gives me the efficient frontier. So that's where we are now. So now to answer Kelsey's question, I'm going to backtrack because Kelsey, what you do is I put in my favorites list, right? You don't need to do that. What you do instead is go to your 401k and you look at the investment types. It should give you the exact investment and then it should tell you the asset class that that investment is in. Once you find that, just put that asset class into the sufficient frontier and only use those asset classes. Because the other constraint I'm giving it, Paul,

is I'm not giving it every single asset classes. I've handpicked 13 of these. You can handpick whatever's available to you in your 401k. This is my suggestion if you have a place like Schwab or Vanguard or Fidelity where you have pretty much unlimited choices. Let's use these 13. This is a good place to start. Play around with other ones if you want to. That's all fine.

But if you're just starting out and you don't want this to be your career, these 13 are going to get you where you want to go. But if you don't have those available. Right. For Kelsey. Kelsey doesn't have those available. Yeah, Kelsey, what you did was you started with my training, which is brilliant. Go back to these and eliminate these and start with what's available in your 401K.

And it will still, when you hit that view button, leaving the minimum at zero, the maximum at 30 and whatever's in your 401K, boom, it's still going to give you an efficient frontier just based on what's available, which is pretty damn cool. Oh, I have a question, Joe. Should Kelsey be putting in the asset classes that are available in? her portfolio, or should she be actually putting in the specific funds? Because she mentioned in her voice note that for some asset classes, she has two funds that are available that represent that given asset class. Right. The answer is yes, she can. She can then go back where I said asset class

and instead put ticker symbol. Now, what I want to watch for is on the page that has the efficient frontier line, it tells you the time frame. And, this is where we could run into trouble if we put in all the ticker symbols. If a ticker symbol hasn't been around that long, Paula, it's going to give you whatever that short time frame is. So you'll see that the efficient frontier I've created here using my mix is 2003 to 2024. This was the most efficient given my constraints. Right.

You want a longish. That's 21 years. You want a longish time frame. So you're going to have to play around with it a little bit if you're going to use the actual ticker symbols and it doesn't give you long enough time. frame. But heck, I would start there because it's going to tell me the actual funds I should be in. So to summarize, Joe, what Kelsey should do, given the constraints of her portfolio, is put in the actual ticker symbols of what's available. Yes. And then run portfolio visualizer with those

ticker symbols in place. And watch out for the time frame it shows on the bottom. And if that's not a solid 20 years, then I need to maybe go back to asset classes. And then I'll use a second tool like Morningstar to A-B test, look at these two funds side-by-side and just make a decision. You know, what's funny is one thing that was part of this research that Markowitz did, he proved that the asset class is far more important than the fund, which, you know, goes back to another rant, you know, I've had Paula, is everybody's worried about fees, fees, fees, fees, fees.

Well, you could be in the cheapest fund that's not on the efficient frontier. you're not going in the right direction. You could be in an expensive fund that's on the efficient frontier. You're going to go much, much, much further. So our fee is important? Absolutely, they're important. But is it where I start? Not in a million years.

I'm going to start with this. I'm going to start with figuring out what's here. And then if I've got two fun choices and one fund is much cheaper than the other, I'm going to go with a fund that is lower fee. What you just said, Joe, about people freaking out about fees while ignoring the bigger question of, am I even in the right asset classes to begin with? That reminds me of if you make a parallel to food and nutrition, I will sometimes see people freaking out about seed oils, but they're binge drinking until they're blackout drunk every weekend, right? Yeah. And so if you're trying to get healthy, address the big problem first. Yeah.

It's okay to have a little bit of canola oil. If that's not the $4.5 million question that you need to be addressing right now. And that's why I roll my eyes when I hear the feed discussions come up in online communities. It's the same thing that this person's friend, your imaginary person, it's the same thing their friends do when they're They hear them going on about seed oils. Really? Maybe if you took it easy on the weekend, that's more important. Then let's talk seed oil.

It's the same thing. It's not that seed oils are not important. Of course, of course it's great. But let's start with the big picture. Yeah, you've got a much bigger problem to solve that deserves your attention first. I'm glad you brought that up because this is also the reason I want to be clear. Everyone knows I do love Paul Merriman. I think he's brilliant.

Too many people call him a wizard. and this is why I want people to understand our community to understand the efficient frontier versus just go to Merriman. If you don't want to do the work and you want to go to Merriman, I hope you understand what Merriman's doing. Because if you get the why behind it, it's less magical. All Merriman's doing is getting you closer to the efficient frontier. If that's enough for you, then fine. That's great. But by understanding the efficient frontier, it's less magical.

You understand that this is the most efficient or more efficient way. to reach your goals. And it's also, I believe Paula, when you're using the efficient frontier that's yours and you set the constraints and you put the funds in, it's going to be sticky, which means it gets to the behavior. If you're using somebody's magical approach and the market goes down and you don't understand why Paul Merriman's four fund portfolio went down and you're in it, you know what you're going to do? You're going to bail because you don't get it. But if you went through the efficient frontier and you took just a few more minutes to set this up like we just did and then you're going to rebalance it once a year to stay on it when the market behaves like it behaves

which is like a roller coaster you're much more likely to stay on the roller coaster because you know the why behind what you just did and i think that's where the power is the power's in the why not in the merriman although i love jail collins and merriman but you know you you can see, I hope now, everybody can see over the last hour, really where I believe they fit. Jail Collins makes it so you don't freak out about investments. And you know what? When you graduate, you still don't need to freak out. You just go to the efficient frontier. Look at what historically got you there. And then rebalance every year. And then maybe once every five years, look at the drift in the efficient frontier. Because it's not going to move a ton, but it will drift. And when it drifts,

you just reorganize five years later to move it back to the efficient frontier because if you leave it the same, it's going to end up being a little less efficient as things change. So this addresses not just the wider discussion about the efficient frontier for the sake of the entire afforder community, but also Kelsey, your specific question about what should you do given the constraints in your fund selection? Yeah. And now I can see everybody running to their 401k choice. Right. And putting money efficient, which is awesome.

Yeah, exactly. Because many people inside of this community are going to have the same issue that Kelsey is facing, which is you have an employer-sponsored account with limitations in your fund selection. So what do you do? All right, watch the YouTube video so you get a visual of portfolio visualizer and then run that same exercise with the ticker symbols that are available to you. And Kelsey, and for everybody else, if you don't have an asset class that's available that you think is going to be really important.

The efficient frontier changes so much because you have such crappy choices. It gets a little bit harder, but then you do what you suggested in your question, which is I overallocate in my IRA and my stuff that's outside the 401K in an area. And I did this before when I was a pro. Somebody didn't have great international choices and we needed some international exposure. Mm-hmm. I would choose an international index in their IRA at Schwab or Fidelity or Vanguard or wherever. And then we wouldn't use international at all in the 401K because the 401K international choice was just so bad. It was so expensive.

But the more you do that, the harder it's going to get, it's actually way easier to just take what the 401K gives you and do the best you can there and then get more granular and be comprehensive in the other fun. What I don't want people to do, though, is end up thinking this is going to be a big time commitment to get big results. Certainly, you'll get better results. If you get more granular, no, you don't have to do that. Just do them separately. But if you want to, I'm saying, Paula, that you can go, I'm just going to not do it here and I'll do more over there. Right. And Kelsey, this is a concept called asset location, which is simply optimizing the location of your various assets.

So if you have a traditional 401K, maybe you have a Roth 401K from a previous job, you have a traditional IRA, you have a Roth IRA, you have an HSA. Asset location is simply the practice of deciding which assets are going to go into which accounts. Oftentimes, in a perfect world, people do this based on the tax treatment of those accounts. But another approach to that is simply based on the fund selection, the availability of those accounts, right? Yeah. The constraints around each one. So that means that a given account in isolation might look unbalanced, but that account in the context of your overarching portfolio plays that important role in its wider context. So thank you for the question, Kelsey, and enjoy.

running through portfolio visualizer with the assets that are available to you. It is so fun, Paula. And as you can see, it doesn't take as much time, which is why I don't like the name Efficient Frontier. I firmly believe that name makes people go, oh, that sounds so hard. Now, the reason why we are going through this exercise of getting our portfolios closer to the efficient frontier so that over the span of our lives, we can build a higher net worth. And building a higher net worth requires net worth tracking. And that leads to a comment from Molly. That's coming up next. Welcome back. Our final comment today comes from Molly. Hi, Paula. My name is Molly. And I'm just calling with a comment more than a question. I was just listening to your episode about

the 52 tweaks. And I think the second tweak is calculating your net worth a couple of times a year. And I want to point out another reason that this is so helpful is that you can actually catch some little mistakes you might not have been aware of. For example, I have a few retirement accounts and I didn't realize until I was checking my net worth last year that when I rolled over money from an old employer 401k into a traditional IRA, that the money hadn't been invested into mutual funds, that it was still in a money market of fund. So I needed to put that into the right asset allocation. And somehow I hadn't done that step until I did the net worth statement and realize that hadn't been done. So just another reason to do it manually once or twice a year. You never know what you're going to catch that you didn't see somehow. Thanks so much.

Molly, thank you for the comment. And that's a fantastic point. The practice of manually calculating your net worth creates a check and balance, It's a safeguard, if you will, against these errors. Yeah, I love this. This is even Paula, why I really like tracking my money. Even if you don't have an active budget, you know, I use Monarch money myself, but there's plenty of other ways to track your money and just having these tracking systems.

I find that I trip over things like Molly's talking about all the time. I'm like, why did I do that? And we were talking about diets earlier. I have a great diet coach named Jesse. And Jesse says all the time, what gets tracked is respected. And I really like that because once I got this watch and it's made me start tracking my steps because Jesse said, get a watch that'll track your steps. Guess what I look at every day now, Paula? You look at that watch.

How many steps I have just because I have the tracking. So looking at your net worth, putting it on your calendar, looking at it twice a year and going through that manually, you're going to trip over stuff. I love that. Yeah, well, because it's impossible to manually track your steps. Three, four, five. But that's a great analogy, Joe, because there are some metrics in the health and fitness domain that you can both automatically track and manually track, not your steps, but you know, you can pay attention to when you go to sleep and when you wake up. And you can also look at the data that comes from a sleep tracker. Yeah.

And so you have kind of two different experiences of that data. You have your conscious thoughtfulness around that, around your bedtime rituals and your wake-up rituals, right? And you also have actual metrics around the amount of time you spent in deep sleep or REM sleep. I think it's why some of these diet apps have become so successful because, and it's funny, while they will tell you how to be more healthy with your diet, what's the thing they have you do, Paula? They have you record everything that goes in your pie hole. Right.

And I believe that just by taking that second and going, oh, I'm eating this makes you think, should I be eating this? And I look at my steps. I'm like, oh, I only got 6,500 steps in my target. 7,500 every day. I need to go for a walk. What's the long-term impact of that walk, by the way? If I do that twice a week, when I wouldn't have done it, it's a huge impact. Maybe just a little right now, but it's great. So, yeah, updating that worth, Molly, love it. Joe, do you manually track your net worth? Is that part of your practice? I know you have that weekly 20-minute meeting

where you manually review your spending for the week. I don't. I have it all for me. I have it in my app. And Cheryl and I review that on a weekly basis. We do have a, we have a one meeting a year, which is our rebalance meeting. Ooh. Where it's a longer meeting, usually closer to 45 minutes, that we go through everything line by line on a more granular approach. But I don't take the pencil out and do it line by line. Ooh, maybe I can convince you to do that this year.

Oh, boy. Look at the time, Paula. I think this episode's about over. I find it to be a moving meditation. I believe that. Because it is labor intensive. But when you go through that practice, it forces you to pause and think about every single number as you're going through it. You know, in the opposite approach, but that's also why I really like the 20 minute meeting is because of the fact that most people don't do that.

If they do anything, they'll have the longer quarterly meeting or twice each. a year or once a year meeting. And while that's fine, I think that the 20-minute weekly meeting has been a huge key to our success. Wonderful. Well, thank you, Molly. Thank you so much for calling in with that comment. So great. Thank you to Kelsey for the question. And thank you to all of you, the entire of Forder community, for being such an amazing forward-thinking community. Joe, where can people find you if they would like to hear more. Man, an episode I want to draw attention to this week is one that we did last Monday, Paula, because there are people who are like, man, I wish I could invest. I wish this episode applied to me, but I've got so much debt. Do these debt relief

companies work for me? And the answer is, it is a scary industry. There are a lot of sheister companies out there. And one of the premier advocates, a woman Natalia Brown joins us to talk about the good, bad, and ugly of debt payoff systems, how it should work if it works correctly. What are the red flags? I think it's an important thing because you hear these ads on the radio all the time. You hear them just all over the place. And while, as you and I know, it can be a very good experience for people that need help, there's so, so much ugliness in that area. Right. It's an important episode for people that need to do that so later on they can practice the efficient frontier, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Exactly. So that's the Stacking Benjamin podcast, everywhere where finer podcasts are downloaded. Absolutely. Thank you so much for tuning in. This is the Afford Anything podcast. If you enjoy today's episode, please do three things. First and foremost, share this with your friends and family and your colleagues and your siblings. Share this with the people in your life. It's a single most important way that you can spread the message of being good with your money. Second, please open up your favorite podcast playing app and hit the follow button so you don't miss any of our amazing upcoming episodes. While you're there, please leave us a review. Also go to YouTube.com slash afford anything. Hit the subscribe button, hit the notification bell, leave us a thumbs up, leave us a comment.

We love hearing from you. So thank you so much for being part of our growing YouTube community. Third, subscribe to our newsletter, afford anything.com slash newsletter. Thank you again for being part of this community. I'm Paula Pant. I'm Joseph. I'll see hi. And we'll meet you in the next episode.