Seeking Advice: Building a Semi-Retirement ETF Portfolio

Great plan! I didn’t have one at age 30, but I realized your goals for age 50 (at age 51).

Any reasons you’re picking distributing funds? This would only make sense to me if you want to actively allocate your distributions in one investment versus another. It’ll also probably be slightly more expensive as you’ll have higher trading fees compared to the ETF manager. If you don’t want to actively over-/underweight, I’d just go for accumulating.

Your portfolio choice looks balanced to me. Two comments:

  • If I could give advice to my younger self at age 30 who didn’t care about investing, I’d tell him to go all equity. Since I know my younger self at age 30 would fail with picking stocks, I’d tell him to also just go with ETFs, but a little simpler, and no home bias, e.g. 50% VOO, 50% VXUS (or a 60/40, 20/80, see the next comment) allocation in the two ETFs, rebalance every year or so (or rebalance as you DCA invest along the way).
  • However, any advice on portfolio construction is really useless unless you yourself have the conviction yourself to stick with your plan. Hence pick the portfolio such that you feel you can stick with it even when it has a 20% (or larger) drawdown over the next 20 years or so.
    Unfortunately, you can only really test your conviction during an actual drawdown …

Good luck!

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