Advice on managing a stock portfolio

[Greatoutdoors]

I'm in the process of developing a diversified stock portfolio and have fairly limited experience to date.  Today my portfolio is as follows:

Vanguard S&P500 $31k [this was a naive choice originally]
Insurance stocks via company share plan $92k

I intend to save an additional $5k per month going forward.

Today I had a call with one of the Personal Capital advisors having recently signed up to using their dashboard.  I figured it wouldn't hurt to hear them out.  Not surprisingly, they highlighted the inadequacy of the current portfolio diversification.  The sales pitch was to manage and rebalance my portfolio for 89 basis points and switching to a more balance sector mix.  It seemed to me like this is a cookie cutter approach they must use with most potential clients.

Has anyone used Personal Capital or other advisors to manage their portfolios? Or do you simply do this yourself?

I feel like I could do with at least some initial guidance so any steer or suggestions would be welcome.  Thanks

[RWD]

Like many (most?) others here, I do it myself. This series of posts is a good place to start:
https://jlcollinsnh.com/stock-series/

[MDM]

In addition to RWD's good suggestion, see also
Getting started - Bogleheads
Investment Order
www.etf.com/docs/IfYouCan.pdf
for more reading material.

[PizzaSteve]

Vanguard S&P is fine.  Read the Bogleheads wiki, but paying anything to an advisor is not necessary.  Just sell some of your insurance company stock, if no penalty and buy more Vanguard total market index funds, s&p is fine, as is VTI.  Viala, diversified.

Balanced sector mix is mumbo jumbo.  The S and P covers enough sectors of stock types.  At your stage, you dont need bonds, but maybe 10% bonds, 5-10% international, is not horrible to get you in the habit of thinking about those areas and to see how they perform relative to us stocks over time.

[BicycleB]

You can do this without an advisor. Vanguard will advise for .3% and IMHO do a better job than Personal Capital, but you don't need one.

You do need, or at least will probably benefit from, the kind of knowledge in the suggested links. One key thought: Costs and investment performance are both very powerful in determining your long term returns, but costs are far more predictable. Study costs carefully and minimize them to get a guaranteed long term advantage. 

[Greatoutdoors]

Thanks for the advice this is helpful, I've already started going through some of the reading material which is very helpful.

One other aspect I've been looking into is Tax Loss Harvesting, how do some of your manage this? I note that some Robo-advisor (e.g. Betterment) do this automatically for you and wondering if that's something worth outsourcing and paying for?  Or perhaps it's relatively simple to also do this yourself?

[BicycleB]

Personally, I make it a non-issue by using tax-advantaged accounts and managing my tax bracket. No need to bother with tax loss harvesting at all.

Another way to look at it is: Don't sell stock until you need to. Over time, you will have very few tax losses to harvest, and also very little need for them. The Betterment and Wealthfront people are selling a solution to a problem that you can easily avoid on your own.

[jacoavluha]

Personal capital also told me on a cold call that they could help me diversify. I hold Vanguard total US stock index, total international stock index, and total bond index. I asked how they would help me diversify further. They didn’t really have an answer. I asked them not to call me anymore. The next time they called me I deleted my account.