ETF's at my age?
 

I've got a couple Hundred thousand from a house sale sitting in a MM Fund at 4.39% currently

Have been waiting for a correction to jump back in.

I am looking at 2 or three ETF's to put it in but at 68 is that a good Idea?

I have always been in Mutual Funds but ETF's after a lot of research sound like a Much better Idea.

any advice appreciated

I have always invested in Vanguard index mutual funds. Now, they also sell ETFs, but I don't see much difference. Vanguard's expense ratios for their mutual funds are so low that any savings on ETFs would be insignificant. I think mutual funds are more appropriate for buy and hold investors than ETFs. ETFs are more appropriate for investors who like buy and sell often.

EFT's quicker in & out than MF's.

ETF is more tax efficient. Might be good for a portion of your assets

From my limited experience, a mutual fund and an ETF that both claim to track the same index will hold very similar if not the identical basket of equities in about the same percentages. The biggest difference between the two is how they are bought and sold. A mutual fund buy or sell order executes AFTER the market closes while a buy or sell order of an ETF executes as the open market allows. Stop loss and limit orders “work” on an ETF, for example.

Again, I am not an expert in this topic and I don’t even play one on television.

I think you are correct, but none of those differences should be of concern to the average investor. I still invest in mutual funds, not ETFs.

Due to the ETF tax efficiencies, the general rule of thumb is ETFs for taxable accounts and mutual funds for tax deferred IRAs/401Ks

The advantage of ETFs is that an individual can create an age/risk appropriate diversified portfolio which can return similar performance to active mgmt mutual funds, with the biggest advantage is controlling risk and tax implications. With a mutual fund, you are subjected to the portfolio managers tax decisions and costs.


If you want to see a simple, but well balanced, ETF portfolio at work is here
https://www.jpmorgan.com/content/dam...Report_JPM.pdf

you can follow along as well, and make this your benchmark portfolio to track your portfolio against.

good luck

I'm 74, and got very burnt in the "Dot Com" rage. Since then I've tried to obey something a finance professor said to us in class: "Don't invest beyond the sleeping point", in others words, if you so much invested you can't sleep, you have too much invested. That being said, I've gone with SCHD, with an expense ratio of only .06. You might not get rich with it, but you won't lose your shirt either.

It is nearly impossible to time the market. You could dollar cost average your money market fund into ETF'S.

Thanks. My stock portfolio consists almost entirely of the S&P 500 Index. Most of it is in the Vanguard S&P 500 index fund. I don't know much about ETFs, but it seems to me that, in the event that a volatile stock market event occurs, it could cause ETF investors to cash in large portions of their ETF investment, which would require the fund manager to sell off many stocks to raise the required cash. This would cause a disruption in the S&P balance and create a large capital gains distribution. I think this is less likely to happen with mutual funds because many investors are buy and hold investors, not active traders. My opinion. But, in any event, my portfolio has so much capital gain built in, that it would be foolish to convert to ETFs.

Not an advice, but just what I did... I'm 65 and I got rid of all my stocks and mutual funds (except for FAGIX; I'm just fond of it,) and switched to ETFs. My trio of ETFs are VOO, SCHD, and SCHG. I've bought some JEPQ just to see how it does.

There are treasury and corporate debt ETFS as well, giving dividends, not interest, different tax structure.

That's One ETF I am thinking of putting a 1/3 in along with another 1/3 in VTI
Still looking for one for the final third that does not have a lot of overlap of the first two

Just not sure if I should get in now or wait for a correction of some sort since I am 68

Thanks,

That is what I am staring to do slowly

I think that you will find the best strategy for putting a large sum into the market is to invest the whole pile at once. See this analysis from Vanguard published last year: https://corporate.vanguard.com/conte..._your_cash.pdf