The Target Date Retirement fund from your preferred low cost fund provider (i.e. Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab, iShares, etc) is an excellent choice.

If you're investing in a taxable account, Target Date funds might be less preferable than holding the underlying funds (or similar funds if the underlying funds aren't available). Vanguard recently made changes to their target date funds that resulted in a lot of redemptions and extra costs to those holding these funds in taxable accounts.

>Target Date Retirement fund

Every-time I look at those they seem extremely risk adverse for such a long term investment. Sometimes with 50%+ bonds/notes. If you are looking to retire in 5 years sure but I'm guessing most HN are hoping for more than 4% returns on their retirement account 25+ years from now.

Are you looking at ones with retirement dates well into the future? The one Vanguard suggests for people born in 1990 (VFFVX) is 90% equities.

It seems I only looked at 401k options for target-date type which are apparently universally terrible. I never looked at private ones because of this bias.

Vanguard Target Date 2045 (suitable for someone born in 1980, looking to retire in about 20 years) is, as of September 2024, at 50.3% Total US Market Institutional Shares, 33.2% Total International Investor Shares, 10.9% Total US Bond Investor, and 4.8% Total International Bond Institutional.

Fidelity's 2045 fund is even higher in the market, they are 10% bonds and 95% equity (they appear to be levered by 5%).

ITs been a while. I'm referring to the ones that have been presented for choices in various 401k's over the years. Those ones always seem quite terrible. I basically just ignore them now. There may be others that I've not seen outside the the restrictions of 401k's. Maybe I should take a another look and update my knowledge on them.

401(k)'s almost always have terrible choices for funds, because of the principal-agent problem. The agent of the company makes the choices on what funds are available but it is the principals as employees who pay the fees. In half-a-dozen career stops over 20 years, I've seen good fund choices in the 401(k) maybe twice? Which is why whenever I leave a job I always roll it over into my trusty Vanguard IRA as quickly as I can, and get to have my choices for funds.

(401(k)'s and IRA's are treated differently in a divorce, which fortunately has not been a problem for me, otherwise having a IRA is so much better than a 401(k). If it wasn't for the employer matching funds I would never do a 401(k) and just do a IRA.)

Cool so I'm not mistaken but I overgeneralized my thoughts that there are no good target date funds. Just the 401k ones suck, so I learned something.

>I always roll it over into my trusty Vanguard IRA

Same.

The target date fund glide path: https://institutional.vanguard.com/investment/strategies/tdf...

tl;dr at age 40 (90/10) it starts increasing bonds until age 60 (60/40); age 65 (50/50), and then 72 (30/70)

It seems I only looked at 401k options for target-date type which are apparently universally terrible. I never looked at private ones because of this bias.

I use Wealthfront and highly recommend it. In addition to a normal managed portfolio they've also recently offered a direct investment option tracking SPY with a management fee equivalent to the ETF's express ratio. Great for scraping a couple dollars off your tax liabilities with loss harvesting. Can share a referral that (iirc) reduces management fees for a couple months if you're interested.

M1 Finance is quite like this.

I've been pretty happy with Betterment.

generally ETFs as a whole and if you want direct indexing like they offered, fidelity has something similar: https://www.fidelity.com/direct-investing/overview

vanguard life strategy funds

I have money in a Fidelity retirement fund and have invested additional money into Vanguard funds. Additionally, Schwab Intelligent Portfolios have treated me well. That portfolio has total unrealized gains of +37.27%. I have read lots of anecdotal stories of people taking losses using it, though, so YMMV.