I've been bestowed the honor of putting together and executing someone's asset allocation plan.  I'm not a professional advisor, but this was a family member so I guess I don't have to be.  Anyway, it was pretty fun.  I got to explain some of the in's and out's of asset allocation and also got to hear about their objectives and goals.  I think we all have a little speculative blood in us because this person was convinced that clean and green along with pharma was going to bring outsized returns over the next 5 to 10 years.  I'm not sure I agree, but it wasn't really my place to argue.  The only thing I could do was keep the speculative piece of the portfolio to a size that was not going to harm the longer term objectives.  So anyway, here's what we sat down and came up with.

The real goal here was to be about 70% stocks, 20% bonds, 5% real estate, 5% speculative.  Within the stock portfolio, we wanted some international and small cap exposure.  I don't know enough about bonds to tweak the maturities, so I went with the total bond market fund mixed with some TIPs.  I'm also trying to keep the transaction costs down, so spreading across maturities didn't seem like a good use of commissions.  That could be my bond ignorance talking though.  And finally, I tried to keep the percentages of allocation simple.  I'm sure we could tweak the international and small cap a bit higher and achieve better returns over time, but I like keeping it fixed at nice round numbers so that it's easy to digest.  I'll let the family member tell me if they want to get heavier into assets that they can see are clearly outperforming.