When it comes to managing your finances, you may feel like you have to do the most: reap the most rewards from your credit cards, pay as little as you can in taxes, earn the highest returns on your investments and extract the most interest from your savings.
If you feel this sort of pressure, you come by it honestly, says Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement at Morningstar and author of “How to Retire.”
“The [financial] industry has this optimizing mindset,” she tells CNBC Make It. “If you’re just learning and getting up to speed, you probably start to think that’s the only way to do this stuff and that you’re doing it wrong if you cut corners.”
To be clear, if you’re the kind of person who enjoys drilling down into every tiny detail of your finances, and has time to do so that’s fine, Benz says. But for the rest of us, taking a simplified approach can free up time and energy to do other things while keeping us on track to reach our financial goals, she says.
In a recent article for Morningstar, Benz called this the “good enough” approach to managing finances. Though they may not be moves to “maximize” your finances, consider these four strategies, which she says will achieve similar results “with much less time and hassle.”
Reverse budgeting
Many major financial goals, such as saving for retirement and paying down debt, are predicated on your ability to consistently save a portion of your income, Benz says.
“If you are saving reasonably, it obviates the need to do a lot of other things,” she says. “Even if you make subpar decisions about investment selections, for example, if the savings rate is decent, it addresses a lot of things that might not be perfect in the plan.”
Put simply, consistently investing 20% of your income into a below average portfolio will likely get you a better outcome than putting 5% in and earning above-average returns.
If you want to keep things really simple, try a strategy Benz uses known as reverse budgeting. Rather than trying to tinker with your spending to optimize your savings rate, pick a flat percentage of your income — Benz says 15% is a good target — and set that money to automatically come out of each paycheck to be put toward financial goals. The rest of the money is yours to spend as you see fit.
Index investing
Theoretically, someone picking the right investments at the right time can beat the stock market over the long term. In practice, though, it’s really tough to do. Consider the managers of large-company U.S. stock funds, whose job it is to beat the S&P 500. Over the decade ended June 2025, just 8% of those mutual funds survived and beat the benchmark, according to Morningstar.
That’s why Benz recommends building a core portfolio of index funds, which come with low fees and merely track the performance of market indexes rather than trying to beat them.
“A lot of data point to the fact that index funds are really terrific choices, and they’re hands off,” she says. “They can give you exposure to a lot of different parts of the stock and bond market with a single holding.”
“To me, index funds are a great intersection of optimization and the ‘good enough’ portfolio.”
Simplifying financial relationships
No one wants to park their cash in an account that offers practically no interest. But you needn’t move your money around in search of a few tenths of a percentage point either, Benz says.
“It drives me crazy — the idea of people running around trying to get the best cash instrument,” she says. “The best way to tip things in your favor is to go with a low-cost provider that will deliver a persistently competitive yield.”
In the context of a brokerage, that may mean comparing what you’ll get on so-called “sweep accounts” — the places where your money sits within your brokerage account when it’s not invested, she says.
For high-yield savings accounts, it pays to remember that rates fluctuate, Benz says. It will probably be less of a headache to stick with a bank that you like and that pays a generous rate rather than ping-ponging between online banks offering the highest rate of the year.
And if that bank or brokerage also offers credit cards with rewards you like, all the better, she says. When it comes time for you or someone else to get hands-on with your money, having more of it under one roof tends to make things more manageable.
“Reducing the number of financial relationships is such a good practice, which doesn’t mean you want to be completely lazy,” she says. “But if you can try to skinny down the number of entities that you need to connect with, it’s good all around.”
Using an advisor
Benz thinks and writes about finances for a living. She published a book about retirement. Still, when it comes to managing money and planning her own retirement, Benz and her husband have enlisted the help of a financial planner.
Doing so allows Benz to have an optimized financial plan — she’s just letting someone else help with all the fine-tuning.
“She has it all calibrated, and that gives me a lot of peace of mind, knowing that someone else is doing that optimization and using pretty high-powered tools to do it, too,” Benz says.
It’s not that Benz or you or anyone else couldn’t figure this out on their own. But delegating some of the heavy lifting can free you up to focus on the things you really want to spend time and energy on. Benz favors fee-only planners, who may charge an hourly fee, bill you for specific services or charge something akin to a monthly or annual subscription rate. The key is, they don’t get paid to sell you certain financial products, which can be a conflict of interest, Benz says.
For Benz, working with a pro has been worth the cost.
“I felt a little glimmer of like, ‘Oh, I should be doing this on my own,'” she says. “But ultimately, I realized that turning to someone who, importantly, has tools to come up with some really good answers … that I don’t necessarily have, I decided it was a good value proposition.”
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