The 'All in One' Investing Approach

It's the most important factor in your retirement-investing success...

Asset allocation is how you balance your wealth among stocks, bonds, cash, real estate, commodities, and other investments in your portfolio.

Keeping your wealth stored in a good, diversified mix of assets is the key to avoiding catastrophic losses.

If you keep too much wealth – like 80% of it – in a few stocks and the stock market goes south, you'll suffer badly. If you're heavy in real estate (like many folks were in 2006), you'll be wiped out in a big real estate crash (like many folks were in 2008).

The same goes for any asset... gold, oil, bonds, land, blue-chip stocks, etc.

You can get an entire degree learning how to "optimize" these in your portfolio... trying to nail the perfect risk/return ratio. Heck, folks have studied the stuff in depth and done the math behind asset allocation and portfolio theories and won the Nobel Prize for their work.

But much of the "optimization" that geeks come up with is based on forecasts and past data that are wrong more often than they are right. You can get ahead of 90% of investors with a much simpler process.

First, you start with allocating a little pile of money into an emergency fund... You should keep it liquid as cash in a savings or checking account. It makes sense to put aside enough to last you between three and six months, depending on your personal need for safety.

Once you set aside some cash for emergencies... start with a simple allocation where you decide between just stocks and fixed-income types of securities (bonds). If you have a longer-term view and a higher tolerance for risk, you could make your allocation 80% stocks and 20% bonds. If you are closer to retirement and don't like volatile returns, you could do the inverse: 80% bonds and 20% stocks. Most of us fall somewhere in between.

The point is to select assets – like stocks and bonds – that are not perfectly correlated, meaning their price movements aren't tied to each other. Combining them in your portfolio will smooth out your overall returns.

You can easily get more complex, dividing your categories (or "allocations") into domestic and international stocks, and corporate, government, and municipal bonds, and so on. You can even add a small allocation to precious metals, or what I call "chaos hedges."

But before you get into all that, just start simple.

Just remember to start thinking about your overall portfolio. Asset allocation... it's the only way to build wealth long term and sleep well at night at the same time.

To really grow and compound your money over time, your total portfolio needs to make sense. It needs to be more than the sum of its parts.

The problem is that our entire industry tends to spend way too much time focusing on individual stocks... and nowhere near enough on overall portfolio construction.

To make it simple, several years ago, I – alongside a team of our best analysts – helped create The Total Portfolio...

• We took the same approach that big Wall Street funds take...
• We selected our best recommendations from across our research...
• We put them together in one perfectly balanced, fully diversified model portfolio built to grow in any market condition imaginable...
• And we managed it like a hedge fund would – adapting it as the markets changed, adding new positions when needed, and taking profits when the time was right.

If you want any already-made-for-you investment strategy, this is the service for you.

Click here to get the full details.

Here's to our health, wealth, and a great retirement,

Dr. David Eifrig and the Health & Wealth Bulletin Research Team
July 13, 2025

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Reader question of the week...

Q: Hello – enjoy your new car and auto articles very much.

As a long time Subaru owner, I never see them mentioned with any frequency as Hyundai and Kia models, despite their stellar Consumer Reports ratings. We find Subarus to be outstanding vehicles and not ridiculously priced.

Would appreciate any thoughts on the new 2025 Forester Hybrid model. – T.D.S.

A: Thank you for reading, T.D.S. By the way, I own a Subaru Outback myself.

The auto expert on our team, Brady Holt, wrote about the nonhybrid version of the Forester in my Retirement Millionaire newsletter last year. (Paid subscribers can read it here.) Here's what he has to say now...

Unfortunately, the 2025 Forester got a big price bump as part of a new redesign. But you're right, it's still not obscenely expensive. I also love that it has big windows, making it easy to see out of.

The new gas-electric hybrid version is intriguing, too. I'm scheduled to test one later this month, and I'm looking forward to it. It pairs a hybrid system from Toyota with the mechanical all-wheel-drive system from Subaru. This gives it more all-terrain capability than a Toyota RAV4 Hybrid, whose rear wheels are powered only by an electric motor – not connected to the engine like the Forester Hybrid's. But the Subaru isn't as economical in government testing, getting 35 mpg instead of the Toyota's 39 mpg.

I'm a fan of hybrids in general. Because they charge their electric batteries while you drive, they're a low-effort way to cut your gas bill – at low speeds, anyway. At higher speeds, the electric motors are too small to help out much, while gas engines run at peak efficiency. In the Forester's case, the gas model gets an estimated 26 mpg in the city versus the hybrid's 35 mpg. But when you're just cruising on the highway, the hybrid's advantage is just 1 mpg more – 34 mpg versus 33 mpg.

If you mostly take long trips, it makes less sense to pay extra for a hybrid. But for rush-hour traffic, the hybrid can save you a lot of trips to the gas station.

Keep sending your questions, comments, and suggestions our way. We read every e-mail... [email protected].

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