Which is More Terrifying? “Dying Early” or “Living Long” (and Doing Financial Planning Necessary for the Latter)?

The New York Times recently carried a column that probably hit home with many — if, that is, one could bring oneself to read it.  While some people keep postponing “the conversation” discussion about how they want to die, there is plenty of evidence many people are also avoidant of conversations about financial planning for a long life. 

Educating consumers to be better purchasers seems a sensible idea, but an example from recent history illustrates the problem with that. For a long time, the simple investment advice given to consumers has been “buy an index fund.” Index funds are such standardized products — mirroring the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index does not require much management — that just about all of them were initially low cost while offering wonderful diversification.

 

Consumers have been buying index funds, and the market has responded by providing hundreds of them. Nearly all E.T.F.s are index funds.

 

But the market has also responded by charging high fees for this standardized product. In 2004, Ali Hortacsu and Chad Syverson, economists at the University of Chicago, found that index funds had as much variability in fees as their more labor-intensive actively managed counterparts. And these fees are nothing to be scoffed at — paying 1 percent more every single year in fees can compound over a lifetime to noticeably lower returns.

For more on the problem with financial advice — with encouragement to “face up to something [you too] may have been dreading,” read Why Investing Is So Complicated, and How to Make it Simpler, by Sendhil Mullainathan. 

My thanks to Prof. Laurel Terry and Jack Bennett, Esq. for sharing this column.