If you pay more, you get more.

That’s the standard formula, the common wisdom. Buy the basic product for one price, the better-performing deluxe product with extra features for a higher price, and the super-deluxe wow-performance product with every possible bell and whistle for top dollar. More money equals more value, right?  I haven’t found it so.

I bought a watch complete with electronic compass, ten alarms, and altimeter. After a few months, the altimeter still worked but the fixed time was correct only twice a day, and I needed to haul the operating manual around with me to figure out how to work the alarms.

I upgraded from a boom box to a full stereo system and discovered that the antenna on the full system was inferior-full-system users are expected to be CD-listeners, not radio fans–and I couldn’t hear my favorite FM station.

The interior-lighting salesperson sold us on a push-button, dimmable scene-programming system for our kitchen to replace the standard on/off switches. Well, yes, we could create many more moods with the scene lighting, but we couldn’t stop the constant, maddening flickering. Until we replaced the fancy, cinematography-ready system with a more conventional one, our solution was to use the kitchen only while the sun was up.

At the clothing store, when I said I assumed the six-hundred-dollar suit would last longer than the three-hundred-dollar suit, the salesman introduced me to the facts of fashion. No, he said. Actually, because the six-hundred-dollar suit is made of finer material, it will wear out sooner. And since it’s the latest style, it’ll become obsolete earlier.

Yes, lunch at The Four Seasons tastes better than at any diner, my $400 blender does a phenomenal job making smoothies, and our $300 ceiling fan is a lot quieter than the $49 fan it replaced. But many times, adding new! and improved! features to a basically successful product seems only to compromise the product’s integrity and undermine its original purpose.

It’s certainly true for investment products.

A typical S&P Index fund-the investing world’s “basic product”-usually costs about 0.3% per year or less; that’s an annual expense of $30 for every $10,000 invested. The fund has no bells and whistles; it’s just a lamp with a light bulb. It won’t claim to protect you in a down market or shift all your money to the technology sector if that’s where the “smart money” is going. You know exactly what you’re getting: an average return of 11% per year by staying invested in a cross-section of the largest 500 U.S. companies.

But, wait, what if you increase your expenses to 1.5% per year, or $150 for every $10,000 invested, and try to do what academic studies show can’t be done -that is, beat the market? The extra bucks will buy you the bells and whistles of lots of trading, racing around trying to time the market, rotating assets from one sector to another, or ditching the stock with which you’ve become disenchanted in favor of the new “hot pick.”

In so doing, of course, you actually increase the taxes you owe because of all the turnover. And so what if 80% of these active funds under-perform? You’ve got the dimmable scene-programming lighting design that is sexier than the basic product (i.e., the S&P index fund), but is it worth it? Put simply, no.

Think about it. At least five-times the extra money for less performance means less money for retirement. Excuse me, but I’ll take the lower cost, no-frills investment and use some of the savings and extra performance for lighting I can see by-and for the occasional lunch at the Four Seasons…