Taking saving on fees to the extreme.

[nun]

I'm in a state 457 plan that offers a good mix of SSgA (State Street) individual index funds, with some speciality Eaton Vance, PIMCO, Invesco funds and a range of Target Date funds too. The Target Date funds have expense ratios of 0.17%.....pretty good. But the individual index funds from SSgA have ratios like around 0.02%. So rather than buy the 2015 Target Date fund I just bought SSgA bond index, S&P 500, International Index and Inflation protected funds. Net expense ratio is 0.021%. It's not quite as diversified as the 2015 Target Date fund as I didn't include funds with expense ratios above 0.17% like the Eaton Vance High Yield fund and the Invesco REIT, but I can get cheaper fee versions of those in my Vanguard IRA.

So now I'm going to see if my lazy portfolio does any better than the 2015 target Date fund.....it should track it quite well as long as I keep up with the rebalancing.

 

[Midpack]

Do you have the data to do backtesting?

 

[nun]

Do you have the data to do backtesting?

Yes. The target date fund I'm approximating has some REIT, small cap and high yield bonds that I didn't buy. Instead I upped the bond and S&P 500 funds %ages to get the gross assets classes to the same proportions.

The provider site has some good analysis tools (better than TIAA-CREF anyway) and I'll look at my return and compare it with the target date fund.