Thanks for the response @TomTX.
I have considered VTI but am unsure as to how much activity I have to be involved in with this. I know with the VTSAX and VTSMX it takes the final days prices and I dont really have to do any trading myself. My objective is to invest and not touch it, say until retirement (with the hope of adding more money throughout the year).
Would you say VTI offers similar benefits to to these mutual funds? but I assume I would have to actively trade? which I dont have much knowledge about.
Look forward to hearing your thoughts.
You don't have to be very active at all. When you have a reasonable amount of money to invest you send it to your brokerage and buy VTI. Depending on your broker, they may reinvest dividends for you or you may need to do it manually once in awhile.
The only real differences are:
You can buy VTI through any broker with access to exchanges it trades on instead of having to buy a mutual fund (VTSAX) from Vanguard. Much easier to access it. Instead of buying the end-of-day price, you either buy at the time you place the order, or you tell the broker what price to buy it, and if it drops to that price, they buy for you. Easiest is to just buy at current prices.
Typically you can't buy partial shares of VTI, whereas you can often do that with mutual funds.