Moving house reveals how irritating your life has become.
You start with the obvious things. Council tax. Banks. Utilities. Insurance. Driving licence. Dentist. Then you find some obscure account you opened in 2017 because it gave you a 0.4% better rate and seemed like the act of a financially responsible adult.
Every account needs logging into. Every login needs finding. Every service wants to send a code to a phone, an app, or possibly a fax machine in Luxembourg.
I had the familiar thought.
What is all this?
The answer, annoyingly, is that most of it was sensible when I set it up.
I’m prone to optimisation. If there’s a better interest rate, a neater system, or a clever way to save 14 seconds per month, I’m interested. This is how you wake up one morning with too many bank accounts, subscriptions, tools, logins, and small bits of administrative lint stuck to your life.
No individual decision feels ridiculous. A better savings rate makes sense. Trying a promising tool makes sense. Keeping the subscription because you might need it next month makes sense.
The problem arrives incrementally. Each addition earns its place at the moment it enters. Very few earn their place forever.
The admin tax
I’ve got a simple test for the work I want to do:
- Is it building a compounding asset?
- Is it creative?
- Do I want to do it just for the fun of it?
If the answer is no, I want as little of it as possible.
Admin fails this test spectacularly. I’ve never once closed my laptop after updating an address and thought, “Well, that was the good stuff.”
The real cost of complexity is the number of things that can go wrong. More accounts means more places to check. More tools means renewals, password resets, and billing problems.
This is why cancelling subscriptions feels so good. The money is part of it, of course. I like money. I’m prepared to be brave and say that publicly. The bigger relief is deleting a tiny future obligation.
Culling season
Permanent minimalism would be a lie. That would last about four days before I decided to test a new app, account, or system for tracking whether I’ve drunk enough water. I know my nature.
My answer is to accept that complexity accumulates. You try things. Some work. Some stop working. Some never worked, but you kept them because undoing a decision takes more energy than making one.
Then the total becomes too much and culling season begins.
Culling season is the period when everything has to earn its place again. The bar is high, because the whole point is to get rid of as much as possible.
Does this account earn its place? Does this subscription? Does this task?
This is a different mindset from normal optimisation. Normal optimisation asks whether a new thing might be better. Culling season asks whether an existing thing deserves to survive.
That question recently led me to kill off a load of subscriptions, which was far more enjoyable than it had any right to be. I’ve also rationalised several bank accounts down into one main account.
It’s the same pattern I’ve followed with investing. I used to have more complicated stuff going on. Then I trimmed it down to six index funds.
I’m sure there’s a more optimised version. There’s always a more optimised version. It can live its rich and fulfilling life without me.
Simplicity has to be maintained
The annoying discovery is that simplicity needs maintenance. You can’t tidy your finances, subscriptions, systems, files, and accounts once, then glide serenely through life like a man in a linen shirt in a pension advert.
New things creep in because new things are useful, interesting, or fun.
The aim is to notice when the admin tax is too high, then be ruthless.
The cycle is probably this: Explore. Add. Accumulate. Get annoyed. Cull.
Repeat until death, or until someone builds one perfect app that handles all of life. I look forward to subscribing to it, then cancelling it during the 2031 culling season.