...starting is actually more important than getting everything right. ...
^this
If you are young and growing a stach, the important and more 'painful' bits are getting badass frugal and increasing your savings rate and lowering your expenditure. This is much, much harder than portfolio choices.
The sticky grabs the key elements of tax optimisation and grabbing employer's free money.
I'm pretty sure we all have different (and often rightly so) asset allocations and ways to organise our passive portfolios. The common threads are almost certainly:
- kill high cost debt asap (credit cards, student loans, stupid car loans, PMI)
- leverage tax code
loopholes complexity and free money
- invest in low cost diversified index funds, with a strong tilt to US equity if you can/are US domiciled, & usually using Vanguard
- don't try to time the market, just get it in and get it in often, and don't sell
- try to understand what you're doing and why it works for you
- there isn't a real short cut, nor does there need to be. (in fact the danger of trying to find a short cut is you get off the surest path to FIRE success)
So there's a continum of portfolios from your pure uncut just 100% US Stocks via VTSAX, to soft and gentle 60% US (& International?) stocks + 40% bonds + some CDs/cash emergency, all the way to deliciously complex mixes of Real Estate, leverage, multiple stock indexes that deliberately overweight small cap (or mid cap) with a % international but excluding Europe, some dividend stocks, REITs and a few gold ETFs in there as a paperweight.
All I'd bet could use historical back-testing justification or logical-like arguments of some kind for why their portfolio is 'best'. The only truth is nobody knows exactly what the absolute 'IDEAL' portolio of investments is going to be for you in the future, and there is no investment reward without risk.
Cut spending. Save in low cost index. Reinvest dividends. Read Jack Bogle. Ignore the markets. And FIRE awaits sooner than you think.