Balance Your Complexity
Getting some Zen in Your Financial Life
Life is complex.
It is easy to feel like there is more to do than time to do it. Every year new things pop up as you get older and older.
It is easy to add an account or few every year. Then one day you wake up with numerous bank accounts, credit cards, insurance (health, life insurance, home owners, car, umbrella, annuity, etc), investment accounts, old 401ks, pensions, spouse’s accounts, kid’s 529s, kid’s UTMAs, etc etc
When you are just hitting adulthood you likely had 1 checking account. maybe a credit card and/or an investment account, and not much else.
Then you started a job and got a 401k and health insurance, maybe with a health savings account. Then you needed a real credit card, not the starter one you had at 18 with a $500 limit. Plus you are making some money so you open an IRA and taxable brokerage. Maybe you had some student loan debt and you upgrade your car so throw on a car loan. The number is growing but still manageable.
After a while at work you become eligible for the Employee Stock Purchase Plan so you start contributing to that.
Next comes marriage and you can approximately double the accounts under you name now (its weird to have separate finances in marriage).
After marriage comes kids, so now you need some life insurance forsure. And you aren’t a deadbeat so each kid gets a 529 & UTMA. You also can now use the tax-advantaged dependent care flexible spending account (FSA).
And then you find out you can open credit cards or bank accounts to harvest the promotions and make $1,000s a year of free money, so of course you are doing that every few months.
Then you start a side income and need some separate business cards and bank accounts.
And its 2025, so you have multiple crypto wallets or CEX portfolios that you can include on this list.
Just typing it is tiring.
And we only touched on the financial side of life. Your real life have dozens or hundreds, or thousands more of things you need to remember and get done.
By time you get to middle age, you can easily have 100 different accounts under you name that you should be paying at least a little attention to.
For some of these accounts, there really is nothing you can do but realize you are an adult and life got more complex. You should have bank accounts, credit cards, investment accounts, retirement accounts, insurances, etc. You can’t go back to 18-year old you and have 1 bank account and coast by the rest of life.
But that doesn’t mean there is nothing you can do. There is 1 little rule that helps manage the overall mental drain on you for having all the financials and life complexities…