Thread: 10 yrs to go. Help!

It all depends on how much risk you can handle. If you wish to contribute 20% to each and this works and your happy with the return then that is what I would do. Everyone has different strategies. The main thing is your saving for the future. Most of these accounts only gain with time and if you have that you may want to get more aggressive and put more in the stock funds and hopefully get a higher return.

ucla81,

You've got a good solid, diversifiedallocation of 60% stocks and 40% bonds. Unless you need a higher return to meet your goals and you're willing to take on more risk, there's no reason to change. However, you may want to rebalance on a periodic basis, e.g. once a year.

Incidentally, rebalancing is when you sell assets that are performing well to buy assets that are performing poorly to get back to your original allocation percentages, e.g.selling I Fund shares to buy F Fund shares. Rebalancing keeps your risk profile constantand forces you to buy low and sell high. If you don't rebalance, your portfolio will drift towards higher risk, e.g. more stocks. For example, during the 90's a 60/40 portfolio that wasn't rebalanced would have drifted to higher and higher C Fund allocations... until the bear market of 2000-2002.

If you're not going to make market timing trades like a bunch of us, check out www.401khelp.com. There is an independant evaluation of the TSP along with some other big name company 401k plans. There are four allocation recommendations based on risk tolerance. :^