What are you invested in? Target date funds, ETFs, individual stocks? Do you think of your portfolio as aggressive, neutral, or conservative?

It occured to me the other day in a discussion about lifestyle creep that a lot of discussions about retirement assume you earn at the 10- or 20-year historical average returns of the S&P500, but it would be very unusual to be 100% in the S&P500 for your entire working life. So, the effect of small changes in cash infusions (i.e. splurging on large but infrequent purchases) is lessened when you consider that most people will be invested more conservatively and real returns will be lower.

So what do you have setup?

Currently about 70% of my retirement account value is in a 401k, which is 100% in FFLDX, a Fidelity target retirement 2055 fund. I’m not as pleased with the returns on this. It says I’m up 11% 1Y but I frankly don’t believe it because it’s worth barely more than the cash that’s been put in to it in that time. Our fund picks for our 401k are kind of crap. The other 30% account value is in a Roth IRA, which I have distributed as:

55% FXAIX (FID S&P 500 ETF)

20% FSPSX (FID international ETF)

15% FSMAX (FID domestic whole market ETF)

10% FXNAX (FID bond ETF)

I would consider this overall rather neutral, maybe even conservative considering my age (31). What do you think?

  • TheWoozyEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    I’m pushing 60, so I’ve collected accounts at Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab and a couple credit unions. I’ve got too many individual funds and ETFs to list, but my allocation is:

    45% domestic stocks 25% international stocks 25% US bonds 5% short term/cash

    My stocks are nearly all index with a slight small-value tilt.