Hey y’all! I have been thinking that this community could use a weekly discussion thread. Feel free to comment below with anything and everything money related that is better suited to a conversation or a quick question and answer than a full post. Some ideas include:
- Journaling about an ongoing job search
- Asking for ideas about how to manage an emergency fund
- Logging recent stock trades
- Talking about the impact of inflation on your budget
- Your plans for maximizing the rewards on a credit card
Again, those are just suggestions, if there’s really anything you’d like to talk about related to finance in your life, feel free to put it here.
Alright broad rundown time so I can reference on future posts:
For retirement I am currently following a portfolio allocation from Ben Felix, adapted for the U.S. by this website, with a 15% bond allocation. For those who don’t want to click through, this is essentially a total market portfolio that makes sure to cover domestic and international equities, with a bias towards small cap value stocks, which historically have shown additional returns over large growth stocks. The bond allocation is more by accident if I am being honest, and I will probably gradually reduce it as I am pretty young and I find the arguments presented for lifecycle investing pretty convincing. I am more or less hitting my target allocation now, as I just finished a 401k rollover and was able to get everything the way I wanted.
I have a small hobby investing account, funded from my hobby budget and currently less than $1k in total after getting a $100 bonus for funding the account. The investments there are mostly picked based on what I think is interesting, including the following:
Funds
Sounds like a solid plan. I link Ben Felix’s videos to people a lot. As far as small cap tilt etc, the most important thing is that you’re putting money into stocks consistently and letting it grow. There’s a tendency to sweat the small stuff with passive investing because it feels like you should be doing something, but in reality it’s a gamble that’s probably only worth a few days of extra work before you retire.
I’m personally 0% bonds in the accumulation phase but everyone has their own opinions on that sort of thing. My strategy is just setting up a bond tent around retirement and ignoring bonds otherwise