Short Term, all in one basket thinking is not prudent. I believe now is the time to store some cash to take advantage of opportunities. 100% in Equity doesn’t allow for this. At the most aggressive, i only recommend an Equity Portion of 70%, but at the obvous bottom of a market cycle like 2009, an 80% Equity position is fine, provided your time horizon is more than 12 years. Good luck, a market correction is coming at some point.

I would never “cash out” of an IRA at any point because of all the fees/tax implications you’d get hit with, but you should be able to “roll over” an account to another place okay. Maybe call National Life group up and ask how that works? As far as *where* to move it, that’s a whole other question but if you’re looking to invest in Vanguard why not just set up a Vanguard account so you can invest directly? And where it would probably be cheaper too? When I was investing in it with my USAA account it came with a steep fee!

I have a SEP IRA with National Life group I want to pull out which I’ve had with them for 1 year now, however, their is a 10% hit/penalty about 4k, question is it worth it to move over to my Chase bank to purchase into Vanguard indiex fund?

The control 190.1 Billion in assets so at .04% the make roughly 7.6 Billion per year. I think they can hire a lot of repairmen 29246 Full Time ($125 repairmen per year)

Yup yup, have heard great things about Fidelity too :) I feel like Vanguard has much more of a cult following, but hard to go wrong with either.

Interesting you should ask that – I just came across this post here that talks about how index funds are weighted, although it doesn’t specify my VTSAX :)

Check it out – full of pretty pics to help visualize it easier: http://www.biglawinvestor.com/the-asset-allocation-of-index-funds/

“Some people are a little surprised to learn that many index funds are weighted by market capitalization and not equally weighted. If you thought that buying a slice of the S&P 500 meant that you owned an equal percentage of each of the 500 companies that make up that index, you wouldn’t be the first person.”

And then here’s a post from my friend that goes into VTSAX and similar ones better: http://www.mymoneyblog.com/vanguard-total-stock-market-index-fund-review.html

Hope it helps!

Even though the VTSAX is made up of every stock, isn’t it possible it is made up heavily of a couple stocks? How does Vanguard determine how much of each stock should make up the fund?

I love the idea and the low fees. Just trying to work this out in my mind.
Thanks!

Yup, most people put a percentage into bonds or international to help diversify it more, with increasing of the bonds as you age and/or are not feeling as risky :)

I’ll personally just be buying up as much as I can when it crashes to go even MORE all-in with my VTSAX (I won’t be touching my money for a while), but these “3 fund portfolio” ideas using indexing are just as valid as well.

Here are some articles on it from two other great FIRE bloggers:

http://www.mrcrazykicks.com/efficient-investing-with-the-three-fund-portfolio/

http://www.wallstreetphysician.com/building-vanguard-three-fund-portfolio-simple-index-fund-portfolios/

OUCH!!!

Yes, GO CALL VANGUARD!! :)