if you're willing to handle the allocation yourself, you can just see what vanguard is putting into their 20xx fund, and buy the corresponding funds as ETFs (or their admiral shares funds if you've got enough money in there) and get even lower expense ratios.

as a general note, anyone interested in this should take a look at the bogleheads site, starting with their wiki: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page

You can do even better by going directly through Vanguard and getting Admiral Shares of the corresponding mutual fund, which have much lower fees than the ETFs.

> You can do even better by going directly through Vanguard

yes, definitely go straight to vanguard for any of their products! i should've said as much, thanks for doing so.

they're so easy to deal with there's hardly any point in purchasing any of their products elsewhere.

> and getting Admiral Shares of the corresponding mutual fund, which have much lower fees than the ETFs.

once you've saved up enough to buy into the admiral shares, that's certainly the easiest thing to do. but their ETFs are just shares of the admiral-level funds. so their expense ratios are identical.

https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundIntExt=I... https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0928&...

https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundIntExt=I... https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0970&...

that's apparently some sort of magic that vanguard has patented.

Thanks for sharing that link! I've got some weekend reading material now :)