Financial Advisor Managing 3,000 Clients: Forgetting Your Password Actually Makes You More Money

Source: Diary of a CEO | Published: 2026-04-30T07:00:41Z

People who check their portfolios more frequently take less risk and earn lower returns. Ben Felix's fiancée only remembers her password every four years—and her returns are stunning.

Investing Has Been Solved

Ben Felix likes to say: investing has been solved. The answer is low-cost index funds — buy and hold for the long term. The hard part was never the strategy itself. It's the execution.

The human brain was built for survival, not for processing long-term abstractions. Putting today's money into the stock market, ignoring all the volatility in between, and letting it compound until retirement decades later is profoundly counterintuitive to our nervous system. One academic paper found that the more frequently people check their portfolios, the less risk they take and the lower their returns. Watching your account swing 5–6% in a day makes the market look terrifyingly dangerous, so people reduce their equity allocation.

Ben's fiancée is the perfect counterexample: she keeps forgetting her investment account password. Every four years, the two of them painstakingly reset it, log in, and find stunning returns. Then she forgets the password again. Four years later — it's up again.

"You should focus on what you can control. You can't control the market. You can't control your performance relative to the market. But what you can control is having the right financial plan, setting the right goals, proper asset allocation, emergency savings, and tax planning."

Young People Might Not Need to Rush Into Saving

Many young people feel enormous pressure to save — from parents, from society — as if not saving is irresponsible. But academic research points to a counterintuitive conclusion: saving less when you're young and more when your income is higher may actually be the superior strategy in economic models.

The reason this topic is tricky is that it's easily abused. If someone spends every cent in their twenties and never flips the switch to saving mode, they'll be in serious trouble by 50. The terrifying thing about saving is compound interest: by the time you realize there's a problem, it's nearly impossible to catch up. It's the same logic as health — skip brushing your teeth today, no big deal. Skip it this week, still fine. Skip it for five years, and you're in the dentist's chair getting teeth pulled.

How Rare Your Skills Are Determines How Much You're Worth

The first item on Ben Felix's list of top financial mistakes is a controversial one: not earning enough. Many people assume their income is fixed — that there's no room to change it. He disagrees.

The data shows a clear positive correlation between formal education and lifetime earnings, and specific degree types — engineering, finance, business — produce significantly higher lifetime income than other fields. But more important than the degree is the scarcity and complementarity of your skills.

Ben himself is a case study. He studied mechanical engineering, moved into finance, then learned how to create content on YouTube. The combination of those three skills puts him in a category that maybe a hundred people on the planet occupy. If he'd just kept piling up more finance credentials, his income wouldn't have made a quantum leap. But add the rare skill of content creation, and everything changed. It took him about three years to learn how to be natural on camera.

Host Steven shared his own story: early in his career, he did marketing — helping Uber and beverage companies sell products. Then he joined a biotech company about to IPO and did marketing there — same skill set, different market. His first contract was worth $8 million over six months. He calls it the turning point of his career: what matters isn't just what skills you have, but which market you deploy them in.

The Hidden Costs of Homeownership Are Far Higher Than You Think

A few years ago, Ben Felix made a video introducing a framework called the "5% Rule," which racked up millions of views. The logic works like this: add up all the unrecoverable costs of owning a home — property tax at roughly 1%, maintenance at roughly 1% (he now thinks this should be over 2%), and the opportunity cost of capital at roughly 3% — totaling 5%. Multiply the home price by 5%, divide by 12, and you get the rent-vs.-buy breakeven point.

Take a $300,000 home: 300,000 × 5% ÷ 12 = $1,250. If you can rent comparable housing for $1,250 or less, renting is the better financial decision, purely by the numbers.

Maintenance is the most consistently underestimated cost. After six years of homeownership, Ben says the actual maintenance costs far exceed 1% or even 2% of the home's value. Steven echoed this: the garden needs upkeep, the pool pump breaks, the patio cracks, the heating system dies — every time he returns to his house (which is in another country), the first week is spent building a new repair list. And people rarely just fix things back to how they were. They "upgrade while they're at it" — spending that would never happen as a renter.

There's another cost that's rarely discussed: the time spent coordinating repairs. Calling contractors, waiting for them to show up, dealing with no-shows — for high earners, this time may cost more than the repair itself.

Buying a Home Locks Up Your Mobility

For young people, the biggest risk of homeownership may not be financial — it's the loss of mobility. Ben has seen cases in Toronto where someone bought a condo, then received a job offer abroad, but the condo had cratered in value. Selling meant a massive loss; not selling meant they couldn't leave.

Ben's own experience is telling. From the time he and his wife met to having four kids, they rented four different places — from a small apartment to a townhouse to a detached home. Each time their needs changed, they waited for the lease to end, gave notice, and moved. If they'd been owners, transaction costs alone would have been staggering. Or they'd have had to buy the large house they'd eventually need far too early, shouldering enormous opportunity costs for years.

He also shared a real-life example of opportunity cost: a few years ago, he had the chance to buy equity in his company, but because he'd just bought a house and the well pump happened to break at the same time, he had to scale back the amount of equity he purchased. The stock market's opportunity cost runs roughly 7%, but certain once-in-a-lifetime opportunities can yield far more.

Vacation Homes Are a Terrible Idea

Steven admitted he bought a vacation home, which he calls "a bad decision." The reason is simple: owning a vacation home means you go to the same place every vacation. This fundamentally defeats the purpose of a vacation. Especially when you're young — when you can still climb mountains and explore the world — you've tied yourself to the same house.

Ben said he hasn't bought a vacation home, primarily because of the mental burden. Managing one property is exhausting enough. He can't imagine worrying about a second home he doesn't even live in.

Setting Financial Goals with the PERMA Model

Ben's firm developed a three-step process to help clients set higher-quality goals. Step one: list your goals. Step two: double the list — research shows that forcing yourself to think harder surfaces goals that are equally important but weren't top of mind. Step three: stress-test them against the PERMA model.

PERMA comes from positive psychology and covers five dimensions: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment. If one of your goals — say, buying a Ferrari — doesn't map to any of these five dimensions, it probably isn't worth saving for.

Ben says most people have never seriously thought about what a good life looks like for them. Everyone's too busy, running on autopilot day to day, and autopilot tends to push people toward short-term gratification. Steven admitted he's probably overinvested in the "Accomplishment" dimension, at the expense of some relationships.

Who You Marry Is a Financial Decision

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Michigan categorize people into two spending personalities: "tightwads" (spending is painful) and "spendthrifts" (spending feels great). A counterintuitive finding: tightwads and spendthrifts are more likely to marry each other than to marry their own kind. The attraction comes from the novelty of difference, but the combination tends to produce more financial conflict and lower marital satisfaction.

If your PERMA analysis reveals that you need to save aggressively to achieve your life goals, but your spouse is wired for present-day consumption, everything becomes exponentially harder. Ben says this conflict comes up repeatedly among his clients.

On prenups, Ben's view is pragmatic: everyone already has a prenup — if you didn't write your own, the government wrote one for you by default, and you probably don't agree with its terms. Steven told the story of a friend's divorce: six or seven years in and still in litigation, with lawyers in the middle, incentivized to extract every last dollar, completely destroying a relationship that might have been salvageable. With an agreement in place, the whole process could have been over in months.

Women Are Better Investors

Fidelity's analysis of 5.2 million accounts showed that women outperform men on investment returns. Warwick Business School found that women's annualized returns beat men's by 1.8% over three-year periods. UC Berkeley data showed men trade 45% more frequently than women, resulting in 1.4% lower annualized returns. Revolut's UK data showed women's investment returns exceeded men's by 4%.

Ben attributes this primarily to male overconfidence — men trade more often, pick stocks more aggressively, and think that because they drive a Tesla they should buy Tesla stock. But the efficient market hypothesis tells us that everything you know about Tesla is already priced in.

Stay Away from Covered Calls and Thematic ETFs

Ben devoted three videos to dissecting the problems with covered call strategies. The pitch sounds appealing — you hold a stock and sell call options against it to collect premium, essentially getting "capital appreciation plus income." But the trade-off is that you surrender a massive chunk of your upside. If the stock rises from $40 to $60 and you sold a call with a $50 strike, you're forced to sell at $50. These products exploit investors' psychological preference for "income" while carrying extremely high hidden costs.

Thematic ETFs are another trap. A sector gets hot — AI, cannabis, EVs, clean energy — asset prices surge, then an index provider creates a corresponding index and an ETF launches. But by the time the ETF hits the market, prices are already elevated. Then prices revert, and thematic fund returns tend to disappoint.

The Most Controversial Paper in Finance

Ben made a video about "the most controversial paper in finance." The paper used data from 39 countries going back to 1890, simulated a million hypothetical life paths, and asked: which asset allocation produces the best retirement outcomes?

Conventional wisdom says to hold more stocks when young and shift toward bonds as you age. The paper's conclusion: a 100% equity portfolio — one-third domestic, two-thirds international — was optimal on virtually every metric. Retirement spending satisfaction, estate value, probability of ruin.

The backlash was enormous. But Ben believes the paper demonstrates at least two things: for long-term investors, stocks are safer than people think; and bonds — typically considered the "safe asset" — get severely eroded during high-inflation periods and may be riskier than assumed over long horizons.

An 1847 Article That Reads Like Today's News

Steven read a passage from an 1847 magazine: "The outlook is bleak… France in political turmoil… Britain exhausted by social and economic struggles… America adrift in industrial and commercial chaos… Russia hanging over the European horizon like a storm cloud." The passage could have been published this morning.

Ben's response: the world has endured countless wars, upheavals, and political crises, and the stock market has kept climbing through all of it. There are plenty of charts that overlay news headlines on market performance — the headlines are perpetually screaming that the sky is falling, while the line keeps moving up and to the right. Markets drop during crises in the short term, but over the long run, expected equity returns should remain positive.

For a globally diversified investor, when the world goes haywire, there's no need to touch the portfolio.

Will AI Change Everything?

Ben admits he's not a labor economist, but he likes to look for historical patterns. When ATMs first appeared, everyone assumed bank tellers would be wiped out. The opposite happened — ATMs lowered the operating cost of bank branches, so banks opened more of them, and the total number of tellers actually increased. The Jevons Paradox tells the same story: when steam engines became more efficient, the coal industry didn't shrink — it boomed because trains expanded into passenger transport.

He thinks AI will most likely follow the same pattern. But he also concedes that the speed may be different this time — AI deploys via the internet and can scale instantly, unlike any previous technological revolution. As for where the displaced workers end up, he honestly doesn't know — but every previous wave of automation triggered the same panic, and every time, people eventually found new work.

As an investor, his advice hasn't changed: every technological revolution in history has seen asset prices spike and then pull back, but for the globally diversified investor, this isn't catastrophic. If the warning signs of a market crash were truly obvious, prices would already reflect them today. Market crashes always happen when nobody expects them — some new piece of information surfaces, some catalytic event occurs, and only then do prices fall.

Put Your Money in Index Funds and Forget the Password

If you had to distill Ben Felix's entire financial philosophy into one sentence, it would be this: buy globally diversified, low-cost index funds, allocate 100% to equities, and stop looking at it. His own portfolio is exactly that — aside from his primary residence and company equity, every dollar is in the stock market. No crypto, no thematic ETFs, no covered calls. He doesn't expect this allocation to change at any stage of his life.

$10,000 invested at 7% annual returns for 40 years becomes $150,000. That means every $10,000 you spend today is really $150,000 spent. A $10 coffee is worth $150 in 40 years. But Ben immediately adds: this doesn't mean you shouldn't spend money. The PERMA model exists to remind you that positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment all matter. The key is making sure what you spend actually delivers on those dimensions — not a daily habit you don't even enjoy.