How to Get Rich Slowly
Each day investors receive an endless stream of data, opinions and forecasts from social and financial media sources. This tidal wave of information can seem overwhelming and leave investors suffering from information overload. But the major principles that underlie investment success aren't that complicated. Here are a dozen recommendations that can simplify investing and enhance the likelihood that you'll achieve your financial goals.
Source: "How To Get Rich Slowly", On Course Financial Planning newsletter, August 2026.
Key Principles
Get a written financial plan. A plan should incorporate your time horizon, risk tolerance and financial goals; it should assume the inevitability of bear markets and use conservative return expectations. During stock market declines, a financial plan helps guide your actions and provides the incentive to continue funding your portfolio — when stocks are on sale. Absent a financial plan, a portfolio is like a rudderless ship in stormy seas.
There is no benefit, just additional risk, in owning individual stocks. An employee's financial welfare is highly correlated with the price of their employer's stock — layoffs, pay cuts and falling stock prices often occur at the same time. Owning individual stocks increases portfolio risk while offering no legitimate expectation of higher than market returns.
Simplify investing by using index funds. A buy, hold and rebalance strategy using a diversified portfolio of index funds is the best strategy for most investors. For the 12-month period ending June 30, 2026, there were net outflows of 1.2 trillion into index funds, according to Morningstar.
Your behavior as an investor can have a greater impact on your financial future than the performance of your investments. Investor behavior is predictable and repetitive — FOMO leads to buying stocks in bull markets and panic leads to fleeing stocks in bear markets. Morningstar's 2026 Mind the Gap Survey found that the average dollar invested in US mutual funds and ETFs earned 8.7% per year over the 10 years ended Dec. 31, 2025 — about 1.2% per year less than these funds' 9.9% aggregate annual total return over that span. That "investor return gap" is explained by the timing and magnitude of investors' purchases and sales of fund shares, and it has cost investors an estimated $3.8 trillion in gains over the past decade.
Create a portfolio based on historical returns, not recent performance. Chasing past performance — "recency bias" — afflicts both amateur and professional investors. An asset class that has produced exceptional recent performance will more often than not soon yield disappointing returns and revert to its long-term historical performance.
Live below your means and save as much as you can. Retirement planning isn't about exact numbers — it's about making broad conservative estimates about the unknowable future, erring on the side of excessive savings and moderate return expectations.
The Fund Manager Hall of Fame is an empty room. Per the S&P Year-End 2025 Persistence Scorecard, of the 505 top-quartile performing domestic active stock funds of 2021, 177 remained top quartile in 2022, two remained top quartile in 2023, and none were top quartile in 2024 or 2025. Active U.S. equity funds held 19.1 trillion in index funds — meaning about 46% of U.S. equity fund investors are paying higher fund fees in the hope of getting above-average returns, a tactic that has rarely been a winning strategy.
Shun all forms of market timing. Even with a century of market data to analyze, no strategy has been found that can successfully time entry to and exit from the stock market. The financial benefits of stock investing come in unpredictable, short bursts, and the only way to reap them is to be invested for the long term.
Avoid complexity. Be wary of investments described with words such as "alternative," "smart beta," "tactical," "quant," "proprietary," "hedged," "3x," "buffered," "structured note," or "absolute return." A study by Research Affiliates found that the superior performance "discovered" in backtests almost always disappeared once theory was turned into real investments.
Your portfolio must outperform inflation. Market volatility feels like the greatest risk, but inflation is a greater one — markets recover, but the loss of purchasing power is permanent. Many investors are "losing money safely" by holding too much in fixed income yielding less than inflation.
Be optimistic. Earnings are the ultimate driver of stock prices. In Stocks for the Long Run, Jeremy Siegel studied big market moves since 1800 and found that 75% of the time there was no rational explanation for major moves up or down in stock prices — almost nothing of long-term significance happens on any given day, but there is a false sense of urgency behind the media's noise and headlines.
Ignore your neighbors. State Street's Center for Applied Research 2014 report found that 29% of investors defined investment success as "making gains and no losses" and 25% defined it as "outperforming the market" — beliefs that suggest over half of the people around you are spring-loaded to buy high and sell low. Decisions to buy and sell should be based on a financial plan, not short-term market movements or the opinions of amateur investors.
Don't confuse correlation with causation. Markets generate enormous amounts of data, and it's easy to find patterns that look meaningful but aren't. If there is no reasonable explanation for why an event had an effect on the stock market, be skeptical of trading on the relationship — most "causations" for short-term market movements are merely unrelated random events.
Notable Examples
- "Super Bowl Indicator": A joke popularized in the late 1970s claiming an original-NFL team win predicts a rising market and an original-AFL team win predicts a decline. It ran about 75% accurate through a stretch in the 1980s-90s, then degraded to roughly the 50/50 proposition it always statistically was.
- Cathie Wood / ARKK: After the ARK Innovation ETF gained 153% in 2020, $20 billion in new investor money arrived. Its annualized total return for the 5 years ending 8/10/26 was a negative 7.7%, per Morningstar.
- Coin-flip homework: A professor teaching probability had one student flip a coin 100 times and record it, while the rest of the class wrote down 100 "random" heads/tails without flipping. He always correctly picked out the real coin-flip paper — it was the one with the longest run of consecutive heads or tails, something people avoid writing down even though it occurs naturally in random flips.
Bottom Line
Stick with what has always worked best — diversification, optimism, patience, and a long-term time horizon.