As many of you know, I retired 30 years ago at age 38 once I'd accumulated enough capital to live off the "4% rule" at age 38. You're wasting your time if you're spending 10 hours per week on investing (though I assume it's an engaging hobby for some).

Yeah, well, if I didn't have a wife and 3 children then I would have been able to retire that early, too.

Most people would rather have a family with loving wife and kids than to be single & alone for their entire life. But you do you. De gustibus non disputandum est.

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You're wasting your time if you're spending 10 hours per week on investing (though I assume it's an engaging hobby for some). The long running DALBAR study ...

Ah, you are assuming that one can start out by knowing what you know only after educating oneself.
The problem with the DALBAR study, et. al. is that there are many many studies and articles and papers, all with differing conclusions. You don't automatically know which ones are good and which are bad. Everybody says theirs is best.


This is the way I explained the advantages of "long-term buy & hold, low-fee, index fund investing" to my engineering colleagues at the office.

Almost exactly my experience. I could not even make anybody see the benefit of using payroll deduction to buy company stock at 15% discount every 6 months and immediately selling it. ESPP. An immediate risk-free return of 17.65% twice a year. All you have to do is delay taking 10% of your paycheck by 6 months for ONE TIME. And we were all engineers.
Funny, it took my wife (without an engineering or math degree) only a simple explanation to understand that buying the S&P500 index fund wasn't "spending" but was an investment.