<prompt> Human: Deferring consumption is a much tougher sell than the alchemy of fund selection, and so the industry, with clients and advisers both complicit, spends far more time thinking of one than the other. Putnam Institute has done a well-constructed study which looks at the impact of fund selection, asset allocation, rebalancing and simply saving more, and finds that over the long term delaying gratification is the name of the game. The Putnam study was concerned with defined contribution plans, under which employees save by allocating their money among an array of funds with different strategies and profiles. Id argue that the findings broadly apply to anyone saving and investing through any vehicle or plan. Putting fund performance front and center in terms of the plan sponsors priorities is an error with far-reaching implications. That is not to say that fund performance does not matter, but our analysis suggests it is a much less powerful variable compared with asset allocation and, most of all, higher deferral rates, W. Van Harlow, director of research at the Putnam Institute, which is sponsored by the fund firm, wrote in the study.Assistant: savings rate dominates asset allocation, which dominates individual stock or mutual fund pics. however people obsess and spend the most time on the least important decision!I would say that savings rate becomes less important once your capital gains and interest become an order of magnitude greater than what you can save. this would mean your portfolio is about 20x your income so this situation is not common!!!Human: savings rate dominates asset allocation, which dominates individual stock or mutual fund pics. however people obsess and spend the most time on the least important decision!This seems like a common tendency. People avoid the big, obvious questions, and then spend forever quibbling over small differences in less important matters. I guess its just too easy to sit around and speculate and argue all day, when theres no clear bulletproof answer.  <response>: I see a similar trend in other personal finance matters. Folks will spend at the grocery store thirty seconds calculating the best value on an item times a dozen items times shopping three times a month all to save 40. Meanwhile the same folks live paycheck-to-paycheck paying hundreds per month too much for housing and cars. It would appear the human tendency is to sweat the details too much if the big-ticket choices are too complicated or challenging. 