If you want 100% stocks, you just buy an equity fund.
Of course target-date funds don't have that, that's the point.
Of course it's your money to do with what you like, but how exactly are you interacting with your money and how often?
Also if you want 100% stocks and 0% bonds you can buy VTSAX or VTI (that's US equities, if you want international ex-US there's VTIAX / VXUS).
I have monthly deposits, and mostly just check balances once a week or so. As for buying funds, yes I could do that, but I'd like a nice mix of large and small cap, domestic and foreign, and the tax loss harvesting is quite handy! This would be far more work than I want to undertake elsewhere.
Re:The Vanguard Cyborg Takeover
by cardinals222 on Saturday March 26, 2016 @10:51AM
(#11365813)
you'd also have transaction costs to buy monthly and rebalance when needed which would probably cost about the same as the betterment fee.
For comparison, I rolled over quite a bit of money from a Vanguard fund into Betterment in part because the interaction with my money was more difficult in Vanguard, and I pretty much had to use the website. I also have a work plan with Fidelity invested in a target retirement fund with very low fees, but again the app and how I interact with my money is terrible in comparison.
I understand Betterment is doing less, which is probably why everything is so easy to find, but for someone like me who wants to have their money 100% in equity assets and diversified with an easy dashboard, Betterment is far and away the simplest. A nice bonus is that I can crank my allocation up to 100% stocks 0% bonds which it seems none of the target date retirement funds will allow (I have stable assets invested elsewhere and don't need the exposure in my Betterment accounts).