During this year's tumultuous market activity, I've done a lot of self-reflection. Is my portfolio worse than I thought? Did I get sucked into the hype of certain stocks? I should have sold sooner, right?

So I started looking for ways to simplify my investing process. To be honest, I don't have any formal guidelines or goals for my portfolio, which in hindsight seems like a bad idea. In the past, I thought that creating a "market beating platform" was good enough, but now I realize it's not really constructive.

Several key motivators helped me think of a better way. It started with Value Stock Geek's Weird Portfolio. VSG's content is great, especially his conservative Weird Portfolio if you haven't read it.

After making poor investment decisions and going through the motions of the stock market, VSG decided to take a more conservative approach. Most of his money goes into five low-cost ETFs, while cash is built up and put into very high quality companies.

I think this is a great idea from a personal and behavioral standpoint. Any investor would do well to create a plan while reinforcing barriers to destructive behaviors.

I also read a really honest article on Nick Maggiulli's blog Of Dollars and Data around the same time. The article talked about something I knew way back in the recesses of my mind, but hadn't integrated into my day-to-day investing process.

Here's a quick snippet of Nick's article that sums everything up quite nicely:

Once again, you and I know this stuff, but we may have forgotten it during the last bull market. Despite their flaws, indexes can offer more protection than we give them credit for.

It was decided. As a result, I started researching how I could make my own low-cost and simple portfolio where I could set my own rules and standards.

During my search, I came across this very helpful blog: Optimized Portfolio.

Optimized Portfolio is a site whose name makes it pretty obvious what it is. The site has tons (more than 50) of low-cost, easy-to-build index fund portfolios that anyone can create.

Even though this may seem simple to most of us, there's something about its simplicity that now attracts me.

My favorite piece of advice from the site was writing your own investing policy statement. It's so simple, but so effective. In the past, I have never defined my investment goals, created a solid asset allocation, or decided on how to manage my cash.

Big mistake; huge.

I haven't done this part yet, but it will definitely be part of my process eventually.

I set out with a simple goal: Build a low-cost, all-equity, index portfolio with less risk, more diversification, and outperforms the S&P 500 (with at least a two decade backtest). Is it even possible?

Turns out, yes it is! After a couple months of research and backtesting, I'm excited to share the results of my experiment here soon. Keep an eye out!