For those who are married, do you treat your investment portfolio and your spouse's investment portfolio as one portfolio or two portfolios when it comes to asset allocation.
For example, if both of you agree that an asset allocation of 75% stock / 25% bonds is the right allocation for you, do you maintain a 75/25 split within each of your two portfolios (IRAs, 401Ks, etc.) or do you allow for one spouse overweighting one area while the other spouse overweights a different area, so long as the total asset allocation for the combined accounts in on target?
I'm just curious - so far, we have been just setting all of the accounts to be the same as the overall asset allocation. But we could get some dramatic decreases in savings if we did otherwise - e.g, by each of us overweighting different asset classes (while still maintaining our asset allocation overall when you look at both our accounts together) and purchasing Vanguard Admiral funds with much lower (sometimes 50%) espense ratios (that require minimum 100K invested in each fund).
Obvious downside is that each spouse's individual portfolio could perform wildly different (either better or worse) than the two portfolios as a whole, which would be an issue in a divorce. And of course, we're not planning on getting divorced, but then again nobody does!
Anyway, just thought I'd throw that question about there to see what everyone else is doing, or if anyone had thought about this before.
For example, if both of you agree that an asset allocation of 75% stock / 25% bonds is the right allocation for you, do you maintain a 75/25 split within each of your two portfolios (IRAs, 401Ks, etc.) or do you allow for one spouse overweighting one area while the other spouse overweights a different area, so long as the total asset allocation for the combined accounts in on target?
I'm just curious - so far, we have been just setting all of the accounts to be the same as the overall asset allocation. But we could get some dramatic decreases in savings if we did otherwise - e.g, by each of us overweighting different asset classes (while still maintaining our asset allocation overall when you look at both our accounts together) and purchasing Vanguard Admiral funds with much lower (sometimes 50%) espense ratios (that require minimum 100K invested in each fund).
Obvious downside is that each spouse's individual portfolio could perform wildly different (either better or worse) than the two portfolios as a whole, which would be an issue in a divorce. And of course, we're not planning on getting divorced, but then again nobody does!
Anyway, just thought I'd throw that question about there to see what everyone else is doing, or if anyone had thought about this before.