The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Investor Alley => Topic started by: bjack2 on September 27, 2014, 03:21:45 PM
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Hello all
I was hoping to have some feedback on my portfolio. All of our retirement (thanks to my Wife's work's generous matching program) accounts are tax advantaged (403Bs, 401as, and Roth IRAs) through our employers at Fidelity. Our Roths were with an active manager at Morgan Stanley but we recently moved them to Fidelity so they could all be in one place and of course to invest them more wisely. We have decided on a 75% stock / 25% bond allocation. With brokerage link we can buy vanguard funds but the fee to buy is 75 bucks and this will be charged each year we rebalance. I am certainly not an asset class junkie and want to keep rebalancing as simple as possible. We also want to have international stocks and to tilt toward small / value. This is what I came up with
37.5% Fidelity Total stock market index fund
25% Fidelity Foreign large blend (we will use global ex-us index fund to have emerging as well)
12.5% Vanguard small value index fund
25% Fidelity Total bond market index fund
Thoughts? I know there are things that I am missing but I really want things simple. The only Fidelity small/value index fund I could find had a 1.07% expense ratio (compared to the vanguard 0.24%)
I truly appreciate anyones advice.
Ben
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I think it is smart to add some small cap exposure to your portfolio. If you are with Fidelity look at adding iShares IWN or IJS. Both small value index ETFs with .25 % expense ratios. Pretty sure Fidelity waives the commission for ishare purchases.
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If you're with Fidelity, would you be better off with FSSVX vs the Vanguard Value small cap? If you can do it, try get all your Fidelity investments in their Spartan index funds, they have very reasonable MER's and will avoid the $75 touch for Vanguard every time you purchase / rebalance.
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You should be able to get all Spartan Index funds, I like Vanguard but nothing wrong with Fidelity either. I would not pay to trade Vanguard funds if I had access to the Fidelity's Spartan funds for free.
I'm not crazy about a small value tilt but many like it. I looked at it as I'm getting older, the years from now to retirement are becoming less, most of the cash I have in the market is my latter working years and the most important part is I don't think mentally I could watch small value under perform the broad market for years and not kick it to the curb.
Put it another way, watching my portfolio under perform the broad market 10 years before retirement was something I was not keen on watching. The flip side is true as well and I understand that I could have done better and I'm ok with that. Small value investing is a very controversial topic, be sure you understand the theory behind the Fama French model and the data set they used. As the saying goes know what you are investing in and why.
I applied the same school of thought too Slice and Dice.
my .02
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Your portfolio looks great.
I agree with looking for a low cost alternative to vanguard small cap value due to the fee. (In addition vanguard does not do a great job of loading up their small cap value funds with smallness and value!). IJS much better if you can hold ETFs in your 403B.
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Thanks everyone!
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If everything is through Fidelity, and you are charged that outrageous fees to trade in Vanguard funds, forget them. Even kool-aid drinking bogleheads admit that it's OK to use Fidelity's index funds when Vanguard funds simply aren't an option. When in doubt, look for something like Fidelity's 4-in-1 Fund (FFNOX). It's a 85/15 portfolio that is designed for maximum return.