10 years of retirement, 3 years of quant-ish blogging and I've only done two things

Anyone that follows the blog knows that I have perhaps over-invested in the quantitative finance that surrounds retirement.  Simulators, spreadsheet models, backward induction programs, financial economics, you name it.  It finally dawned on me what I have actually done with all those thousands of hours of reading, coding, thinking, modeling, worrying...  Pretty much nothing.  Over the last 10 years (this august will be the 10th anniversary of my semi-voluntary move to FL and the related semi-voluntary retirement) I can think of only two real, substantive actions that I have taken based on all the stuff I have learned and blogged about. And it's not tactical allocation tricks, investments in funky hedge funds, or insuring lifestyle via esoteric structured or actuarial notes or even TIPs ladders. Here are the two, and only two, big things I've ever done with all the crud that is now lodged in my over-filled head:

1. I cut spending, sometimes politely referred to as lifestyle...very painfully and aggressively...more than 50%. That was in late 2012. And yes, investment fees were part of that calculus, though that came later.

2. I put management and monitoring processes and systems in place. I consider these best in class because I have often built them myself. These are things that belong to and are controlled and operated by me, not advisors or third parties. The basic underlying processes being managed are not really about portfolios or investments as such (directly, anyway, since these are not "processes," they are financial objects) though I do have stuff like that for my trading systems. The processes are, rather, prosaic: spending, income, feasibility (time series balance sheet), sustainability (risk projected out based on net wealth and longevity processes), and maybe a few others I'm not thinking about.

That's it.  Two things.

The financial services industry gets paid trillions and I personally have paid a kings ransom for almost everything but these two things. And I had to do both myself.