Why Minimalism Wins - In Investing and Life
And why I designed a minimalist portfolio tracker.
“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
— Steve Jobs
We live in a world obsessed with more. More data, more indicators, more notifications, more complexity. As a user experience (UX) designer, my entire professional life is spent fighting against that. Good design isn’t about adding features until every pixel is filled; it’s about ruthless subtraction until only the most important remains.
Yet, when we step out of our software tools and look at our personal finances, we often do the exact opposite. We build financial dashboards that look like the cockpit of a commercial airliner, drowning ourselves in metrics that create the illusion of control while actually creating anxiety and inaction.
Why I Built a Minimalist Portfolio Tracker?
In UX design, we have a principle called Hick’s Law, which states:
The time and effort it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices available.
- Hick’s Law
As investor’s, we want to believe that more is better. But in my design career (which has included designing apps for Verizon Wireless and PNC Bank) customer’s tell us a different story.
Give users a screen crammed with fifty different data points, and you don’t empower them, you paralyze them.
When building Yieldr, our goal wasn’t to reinvent how you look at the market.
It was to strip away the noise so you can focus on what actually matters: your compounding, your dividends, and your peace of mind. Because when it comes to both software and wealth-building, minimalism always wins.
Redefining Minimalism: It’s Not What You Give Up
“Minimalism is the intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of everything that distracts us from them.”
— Joshua Becker
When people hear the word “minimalism,” they often picture empty white rooms or stripping away the things that bring them joy. But true minimalism isn’t about what you give up, it’s about what you keep… What you lean into.
It’s about ruthless prioritization. It is the conscious choice to clear away the clutter so that what actually matters can take center stage.
When you apply this philosophy to your finances, minimalism stops being about restriction and starts being about focus.
You aren’t cutting out investments to make your life boring; you are removing the noise, the spreadsheets, and the endless stream of financial media so you can focus entirely on what moves the needle: high quality companies, reliable cash flow, and long-term compounding.
Minimalism gives you your time and your mental energy back.
The Danger of More: The Illusion of Progress
Don’t get me wrong, you need data to make informed decisions. And the Yieldr app doesn’t strip that away. Instead, it take a more thoughtful approach.
Walk into any modern trading platform and you’ll find yourself buried under an avalanche of noise. Momentum indicators, scrolling news tickers, and options chains flash across the screen.
The promise of these platforms is that if you just look at enough data, you will somehow unlock an advantage.
The real danger of complexity isn’t just that it’s confusing, it’s that it makes you feel like you are doing something important.
When you spend hours watching minute-by-minute price movements, reading conflicting analyst reports, or tweaking complex asset allocations, your brain registers that effort as productive work.
You feel alive, armed with enough dopamine to outlast your partner at an outlet mall.
You feel disciplined. But in reality, you are often just spinning your wheels or sabotaging your portfolio.
“The big money is not in the buying and the selling, but in the waiting.”
— Charlie Munger
In investing, intense activity is rarely correlated with better results.
In fact, it’s usually the exact opposite.
Complexity gives us a sophisticated place to hide from the uncomfortable truth of long-term investing: that most of the time, the absolute best thing you can do is absolutely nothing.
And keep that brain of yours on the goal!
What Investing and UX Have in Common
Great user experience design follows a simple rule: get out of the way. The best interface is the one you don’t notice, because it lets you accomplish your goal with the least amount of friction possible.
Investing works under the exact same mantra.
Friction Kills Momentum: In software, every extra click increases drop-off rates. In investing, every extra layer of complexity increases the likelihood that you’ll second-guess your strategy and make an emotional mistake.
Clarity Builds Conviction: When you can see your core metrics instantly (what you own, what it pays, and how your income grows over time) you don’t panic when the market drops. Simplicity builds the conviction required to stay the course through thick and thin.
The Power of Subtraction: Just as writing a clean piece of code means cutting out bloat, building a resilient portfolio often means cutting out speculative clutter to focus purely on durable, cash-producing assets.
Wisdom from the Masters: Why Minimalism Wins
I took some time to read through all the quotes I have highlighted from some of my favorite investing books.
P.S. you can find all your saved notes and highlights at https://read.amazon.com/notebook
As I read through them, it became clear. The investors we’ve come to idolize, think more like a UX designer than a hedge fund manager!
The greatest investors and thinkers didn’t succeed because they embraced complexity. They succeeded because they ruthlessly stripped it away.
“Simplicity is the master key to financial success.”
— John Bogle
“The investor’s chief problem—and even his worst enemy—is likely to be himself.”
— Benjamin Graham
“There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.”
— Warren Buffett
“Simplicity is a great advantage. It helps you understand what you’re doing, and it minimizes the chance of making a stupid mistake.”
— Charlie Munger
“Never invest in any idea you can’t illustrate with a crayon.”
— Peter Lynch
“Doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave.”
— Morgan Housel
“Complexity is your enemy. Any intelligent fool can make things more complex, but it takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.”
— JL Collins
“Flee complexity. Embrace simplicity.”
— JL Collins
Designing for the Long Game
When you look at your portfolio every day, it shouldn’t add to the weight of your day.
It should feel like checking a compass; a quick, grounding glance that confirms you’re still heading in the right direction.
That’s why we built Yieldr.
We wanted a space that respects your time, silences the daily market distractions, and focuses entirely on what builds true, sustainable wealth over decades: clear metrics, predictable passive income, and a frictionless experience.
Because at the end of the day, whether you’re designing a digital product or building a portfolio for your family’s future, complexity is just a distraction.
Minimalism is the strategy. And simple always wins.
Until next time, keep walking!
- Jeremy
Oh yeah, check out my app at yieldrapp.com
This resonates so deeply! As someone who used to get completely buried in the spreadsheets and endless market tickers, I realized all that complexity was just feeding my anxiety.
Your point about Hick’s Law is spot on. I eventually stripped everything back to a minimalist "dual mandate" system:
half pure growth ETFs and half covered call ETFs for monthly cash flow.
Having just two core pillars completely cleared the clutter from my mind.
Because the system is so simple and the monthly cash flow is consistent, I can easily stick to the golden rule of doing absolutely nothing during market dips.
Thank you for sharing this reminder—simplicity really is the ultimate financial cheat code!