Hi goodhope and welcome!
tl;dr:
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getting started is good, it helps you get familiarized with the fluctuations of the stock market.
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make sure you are using the right vehicles for your investing objective (time horizon).
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a simple idiot-proof strategy as linked by @Dr.PI is good enough, potential optimizations can occur latter and shouldn’t lock you in overthinking and prevent you from getting started.
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staying the course is of paramount importance to success. Make sure you are psychologically and financially ready to handle the downturns that will inevitably happen.
Long version:
Your questions are legitimate. I would, however, also take the time to point out that questioning our investments is frequent and can prevent us from thoughtfully following our plan (it does that for me). What helps me is to thoroughly think them through before buying, writing down my rationale for doing it and getting back to why I did it in the first place when the questions arise. Chances are the reasons that made me buy it haven’t changed so I can brush my doubts aside and keep on going.
One of the most, and maybe the most, important factor of success when investing in stocks is our ability to stay the course, which means preemptively putting guardrails to keep our emotions in check and mitigating the risk of having to sell assets due to other factors (unexpected expense, lack of income, etc.). This is part of the questions you’ve asked yourself so your mind is in the right place.
I count 15 years for 100% stocks myself, others use a rule of thumb equating “long term” to roughly 10 years. To note that, for retirement concerns, assets keep being invested throughout retirement. A new retiree would still have an investing horizon of 15+ years for part of their assets.
If you will need the funds for a real estate purchase before then, there are 2 options:
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You are able and willing to postpone your real estate purchase if the markets are down when it would occur and you don’t have the own funds available for it. Or you are willing to reduce your expected budget to account for a potential (heavy) loss in stocks. In that case, if you are actually in peace with your stocks having potentially lost 50%+ of their value when you would want to use them to buy real estate, investing in stocks might be acceptable.
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You will need the assets at a given time and:
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2a) can’t tolerate any kind of loss for it: don’t invest that money in stocks, period. Medium term notes may be appropriate, you can find some yielding 2%+ for a 5 years term or 2.5%+ for a 10 year term.
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2b) can tolerate the potential for some amount of losses and value the potential upside of having your money invested more than the consequences of a potential loss. You may then choose to invest your cash in a mix of stocks and bonds with a more conservative allocation the closer you get to your horizon.
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I’m using Lazy Portfolio to get a rough estimate of the historical length of periods with losses for the various mixes, in USD. Investing in CHF makes those numbers not representative but I use it to inform my own personal decision about what kind of risk I am willing to take chasing returns:
Balanced Lazy Portfolios: All Country World
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100% global stocks (VT) have not had negative returns over periods of 14+ years since 1970 when measured in USD: All Country World Stocks Portfolio: Rolling Returns
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80/20 (global stocks/global bonds) have not had negative returns over periods of 12+ years since 1970 when measured in USD: https://www.lazyportfolioetf.com/allocation/all-country-world-80-20-rolling-returns/
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60/40 (global stocks/global bonds) have not had negative returns over periods of 6+ years since 1970 when measured in USD: Balanced Lazy Portfolios: All Country World
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40/60 (global stocks/global bonds) have not had negative returns over periods of 5+ years since 1970 when measured in USD: All Country World 40/60 Portfolio: Rolling Returns
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20/80 (global stocks/global bonds) have not had negative returns over periods of 4+ years since 1970 when measured in USD: https://www.lazyportfolioetf.com/allocation/all-country-world-20-80-rolling-returns/
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100% global bonds have not had negative returns over periods of 7+ years since 1970 when measured in USD: https://www.lazyportfolioetf.com/allocation/all-country-world-20-80-rolling-returns/
Note that:
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the bond funds used are either USD denominated or hedged in USD and roughly intermediate term.
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there have been bigger crashes and different market conditions before 1970, longer periods of losses may have occured before. See this chart for a visualization of the drawdowns that have occured to the S&P500 for example: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp-500-market-crashes/
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CHF and USD don’t behave in the same fashion. Positive returns in USD may become negative returns when evaluated in CHF.
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the benchmark should ideally not be “no loss” but what a risk-free vehicle (like medium term notes or government bonds) would offer over the same time period.
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I would ideally try to match the duration of my bonds/bond funds with the term of my expected expense, that is, for bond funds, active management moving assets to a lower duration fund should occur as time passes.
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the past is no guarantee of the future.
VIAC or Finpension is, in my opinion, a matter of personal choice. Pure financial parameters favour Finpension but other factors like the behavior of both companies may make one lean toward VIAC (or Frankly.). It does for me.
A VT-like allocation is a solid choice for your assets. Since 3a assets have tax advantages, you may however optimize your allocation further by putting the countries where you gain the most advantage in the 3a and keeping the others in your taxable brokerage account. It’s more hassle and absolutely not necessary but it is an available optimization that would be expected to increase your returns (saving on costs is one of the few ways to guarantee better returns): Splitting the world
Unless they are providing you with a service you value relative to their costs, I’m joining @nabalzbhf and @Dr.PI in that you can handle your investments yourself and save the costs for very marginal increased hassle.
If you have read US boards/sites/articles, that’s a mix that may have been recommended (global diversification (VT) with a home tilt (VOO) and expected better returns with small cap value (AVUV)). Having several funds can give the impression of having more diversification but it is actually the assets they are holding that make their diversification. VT holds 9553 different stocks of companies located in more than 41 countries and is arguably close to the maximal diversity you can achieve in the stock market.
You may want to add tilts to your portfolio but I would only do so if I knew exactly why I am doing it, what the results I expect are and what the risks I am facing to get them are (for example, small cap value have historically provided their outperformance in bursts separated by long periods of underperformance, someone who didn’t wait 10-20 years and gave up on the tilt before the next burst didn’t capture the overperformance and actually underperformed a broad index without tilt).
There are other reasons why one would want to hold more than one fund (diversification around fund domiciles for legal/fiscal reasons, diversification around fund issuers or others). There again, I would only do it if I knew why I was doing it. It shouldn’t prevent you from getting started in my opinion.