Great win! Love your idea of simplifying further of course. One thing I've noticed about your portfolio you've mentioned, no international stocks. This is a highly contentious issue and there's no right answer, but I generally adhere to what most academics say, which is that you should have somewhere between 20-40% of your equity allocation international based. This is what almost all target date funds adhere to, and I trust the thousands of experts on that front. All our portfolio is either in a TDF or Vanguards Total Word ETF VT, that buys the market cap as it stands across all countries.
International diversification also makes intuitive sense to me. I live in the US, spend US dollars, work in the US, and my social security is dependent on the US. Even if I have 40% of my stocks international, I am still heavily dependent on the US, so diversifying internationally seems like a reasonable small hedge.
Over the course of history, whether you'd be better of with international stocks or only US stocks has flip flopped. For the past 15 years or so it's been better to be all US, but I've got many years of investing ahead and am not comfortable putting all my eggs in one basket.
Thank you, Tanner. Great stuff as always. And very astute observation on the absence of international exposure in my IRA. I definitely overlooked it when I planned my allocation almost two years ago.
The good news is I corrected that oversight in my daughter Parker's Roth IRA by, like you, going exclusively with the Vanguard Total World Stock Index Fund ETF, ticker symbol VT. Her investment horizon is so long that it seemed prudent to me. So we'll see. Here's the column from March where I went into it: https://moneytalks101.substack.com/p/parkers-roth-ira-is-up-and-running
Great win! Love your idea of simplifying further of course. One thing I've noticed about your portfolio you've mentioned, no international stocks. This is a highly contentious issue and there's no right answer, but I generally adhere to what most academics say, which is that you should have somewhere between 20-40% of your equity allocation international based. This is what almost all target date funds adhere to, and I trust the thousands of experts on that front. All our portfolio is either in a TDF or Vanguards Total Word ETF VT, that buys the market cap as it stands across all countries.
International diversification also makes intuitive sense to me. I live in the US, spend US dollars, work in the US, and my social security is dependent on the US. Even if I have 40% of my stocks international, I am still heavily dependent on the US, so diversifying internationally seems like a reasonable small hedge.
Over the course of history, whether you'd be better of with international stocks or only US stocks has flip flopped. For the past 15 years or so it's been better to be all US, but I've got many years of investing ahead and am not comfortable putting all my eggs in one basket.
Thank you, Tanner. Great stuff as always. And very astute observation on the absence of international exposure in my IRA. I definitely overlooked it when I planned my allocation almost two years ago.
The good news is I corrected that oversight in my daughter Parker's Roth IRA by, like you, going exclusively with the Vanguard Total World Stock Index Fund ETF, ticker symbol VT. Her investment horizon is so long that it seemed prudent to me. So we'll see. Here's the column from March where I went into it: https://moneytalks101.substack.com/p/parkers-roth-ira-is-up-and-running