Work Your Money, Not Your Life

Chapter 13How to Construct Your Portfolio

Can you relate to this situation? It's Wednesday afternoon, you've lost steam at work, and your lunch break just ended. What a drag. Naturally, you put aside that ASAP assignment you were supposed to finish yesterday to spend a few minutes focusing on more appetizing thoughts – like what you should do for dinner.

Your first option is to go all in, Bobby Flay style. This would entail heading to the grocery store after work, purchasing the individual ingredients you need to make a nice meal, sous chefing, cooking, and cleaning up afterward. That may be the cheapest and tastiest option, but it also takes up most of your evening.

Alternatively, you could pay a little more for precut vegetables to avoid having to spend 15 minutes chopping onions and wiping away your tears – and still get most of the benefits of a home-cooked meal.

Or finally, because it's a weekday, you could just pick up a meal from the prepared foods section – requiring you to simply reheat and eat, and freeing up time for you to watch a movie. While this option may be the priciest and the least tasty, it requires minimal preparation and cleanup.

Believe it or not, the thought process you go through to decide how to prepare a meal parallels deciding how to build your investment portfolio. In both cases, multiple options are available that will get you to the same destination (i.e., nourished or properly invested). However, the cost and time commitment required for each ...