You Don't Need a Perfect Plan. You Need Any Plan.
by Malik Amine
Key Takeaways
- Analysis paralysis costs more than most bad investments ever would
- Someone who invests $500/month starting at 25 has $1.1M by 65 at average market returns. Start at 35? $540K. That 10-year delay costs $560K.
- A simple three-fund portfolio outperforms most complicated strategies over time
- Perfection is the enemy of progress in financial planning
- The plan doesn't have to be concrete. Just have one and adjust as you go.
The Trap of "I'll Start When..."
I hear this constantly. "I'll start investing when I understand the market better." "I'll make a financial plan when things settle down." "I'll get to it when I have more money."
Here's the thing. Things never settle down. You never feel like you know enough. And there's never a perfect amount of money to start with.
What actually happens is people wait. Months turn into years. And the cost of waiting is real, even if you can't see it on a statement.
I'm not saying this to make anyone feel bad. I get it. Money is stressful. There are a million options, and everyone online is telling you something different. It's overwhelming. But the solution isn't more research. It's action, even imperfect action.
The Math on Waiting
Let me show you something that changed how I think about this.
If you invest $500 per month starting at age 25, and earn an average annual return of 8% (which is below the S&P 500's historical average of ~10%), you'll have approximately $1.1 million by age 65.
Start at 30? About $745,000.
Start at 35? About $540,000.
Start at 40? About $350,000.
That's the same $500 per month, the same investments, the same return. The only difference is when you started. According to J.P. Morgan's 2025 Guide to Retirement, the cost of delaying investing by just 10 years is often greater than the impact of choosing the "wrong" investments.
Read that again. Starting late costs more than picking the wrong fund. The decision to do something, anything, matters more than what specifically you do.
Why Smart People Overcomplicate This
I see this pattern a lot with founders and physicians. Smart, analytical, successful people who approach investing the way they approach everything else: they want to understand it completely before they commit. If you're a resident wondering where to start, check out how much should resident doctors save.
In medicine, that's the right approach. You don't want your surgeon winging it. In startups, deep research before product decisions makes sense.
But with investing, the research phase becomes a trap. You learn about index funds, then someone tells you about factor investing. You consider a Roth IRA, then wonder about backdoor Roths vs. mega backdoor Roths. You look at one brokerage, then read that another one is better for tax-loss harvesting.
Before you know it, you've spent 200 hours researching and invested $0.
Vanguard published a study showing that the most important factor in long-term investment returns isn't asset selection, fund choice, or timing. It's your savings rate and the length of time you're invested. Everything else is noise around the edges. For more on this, see investing basics that actually matter.
What a "Good Enough" Plan Looks Like
Here's what I tell people who are stuck. A good enough plan has four parts.
An emergency fund. Three to six months of expenses in a savings account. Not invested, not locked up. Just sitting there for when life happens. This is the boring stuff, but it's the foundation.
Retirement contributions. At minimum, contribute enough to your 401(k) to get the full employer match. That's free money. If you can afford more, max it out. The 2026 limit is $23,500, or $31,000 if you're over 50. If your employer doesn't offer a 401(k), open a Roth IRA (income limits apply) or a traditional IRA.
A simple investment allocation. A target-date fund is the easiest option. You pick the fund closest to your expected retirement year, and it handles the asset allocation for you. Or, if you want slightly more control, a three-fund portfolio: total US stock market index, total international stock market index, and total bond market index. That's it. Vanguard, Fidelity, or Schwab all offer these for near-zero fees.
Automation. Set up automatic transfers from your checking account to your investment accounts. Every paycheck, money moves without you thinking about it. This is the part that makes everything work, because it takes willpower out of the equation.
That's a good enough plan. Is it the theoretical maximum optimized plan? No. But it's infinitely better than no plan. And you can improve it over time.
The Perfection Paradox
Here's something I've noticed after working with clients for years. The people with the "perfect" plans on paper sometimes do worse than the people with simple plans they actually follow.
Why? Because perfection creates friction. A complicated plan with 12 different accounts, tax-loss harvesting rules, rebalancing schedules, and alternative investments requires constant attention. When life gets busy (and it always does), people stop maintaining it.
A simple plan you set up once and automate runs itself. It doesn't need you to pay attention. It just works.
Morningstar's research on the "behavior gap" shows that the average investor underperforms the funds they invest in by about 1.7% per year, not because they pick bad funds, but because they buy and sell at the wrong times based on emotion. Simplicity and automation protect you from yourself.
What If You Pick the Wrong Thing?
This is the fear, right? What if you invest in the wrong fund? What if the market drops? What if there's a better option you didn't know about? For more on handling market volatility, read don't time the market.
Let's put this in perspective. The difference between most diversified index funds over a 20-year period is maybe 0.5% to 1% per year. That matters over decades, but it's small compared to the difference between investing and not investing.
If you put money into a total stock market index fund and it turns out a slightly different fund would have been 0.3% better, you still grew your money at 9.7% instead of 10%. You still have vastly more than the person who kept everything in savings at 4% and lost ground to inflation.
The wrong investment is almost never as costly as no investment. The exception is speculative bets, individual stocks, crypto, options. Those can genuinely lose you money. But a diversified index fund? Over 20+ years, the risk of permanent loss is essentially zero, based on every historical period we have data for.
Start Today. Optimize Later.
Here's my challenge. If you've been meaning to "get started" with your finances and keep putting it off, do one thing today.
Open an IRA if you don't have one. It takes 15 minutes online.
Set up a $100 automatic monthly contribution to a target-date fund.
That's it. You can increase the amount later. You can optimize the allocation later. You can add accounts and strategies later.
But right now, today, get the ball rolling. Because the difference between $0 invested and $100 invested is infinite. The difference between $100 invested in the "right" fund and $100 invested in a "good enough" fund is basically nothing.
The plan doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to exist. And you can adjust as you go.
Summary
The biggest barrier to financial success isn't picking the wrong investment or having the wrong strategy. It's not starting at all. Analysis paralysis, waiting for the perfect moment, and overcomplicating simple decisions cost people far more than any suboptimal fund choice ever would. A basic plan with automatic contributions to a diversified index fund, started today, will outperform a perfect plan started five years from now. Stop researching. Start investing. Optimize later.