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I recently retired. A lot of my pension pot is in Vanguard Life Strategy funds, the biggest one being 60% equities. Now I have another chunk of money to add to the pot and I'm wondering what to do with it. The easiest thing is just to add it to the Life Strategies funds, but I'm wondering if it's better to diversify further with, for example, an equities ETF and a bonds ETF. And if so, how to choose which ones?
Any thoughts?
What’s your attitude to risk? Can you afford to loose some/all of the extra? Have you got your cash flow ladder sorted?
Yes I've given it some thought and for this pot I'm looking at a roughly 50:50 equities:bonds mix. I can afford to wait a bit for it to recover if there is a downturn.
The whole point of Vanguard LS is that it "is" your strategy, not "part of" your strategy.
If your LS60 is too rich for your current appetite, then I'd suggest heading towards LS40.
I've taken a similar approach - but with the global 100% equity ETF (VEVE / VWRL).
Lifestrategy are great products, and a one stop shop as expatscot says above. If you’re ok with the bias to UK there isn’t really a need to look at anything else.
for me they’re too heavily biased to UK so I use a pure market weighted global equity tracker (cost 0.13%)
bonds are a little more complex - it’s generally advised to match your duration to your investment time frame (short, medium, long duration), and some people prefer to diversify into global government bonds (hello Liz Truss)
longer duration = more sensitivity to interest rate changes (market rates not BoE rates)
monevator does an excellent summary of the best passive investment vehicles in each asset class. Look it up
By chance re the website are above payents are split 3 ways into the LS100, sp500 and all world funds with the high-low level of growth in that order.
When I consolidated pensions some years ago, I used 2 of thier target retirement funds - which move the risk the closer you get to retirement automatically, and these have grown more than expected, about 10%.
This basically means I have 75% of my pension in a relatively safe harbour, with the rest and continual pound share Investments into the three above as slightly higher risk.
Thanks for the monevator link - that is useful.