You should never pay anyone to purchase ETFs for you. When applying a passive investing strategy, an investor’s return will be the market return minus fees. So, by definition, investors who follow the premise of passive investing by mainly purchasing ETFs will always be better off investing on their own.

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Robo-advisors will typically create a portfolio for you that consists of a healthy mix of fixed income and equity, where the fixed income will almost always be a bond / long treasury ETF. The equity part will most likely contain a mix of a “total stock market” ETF, an emerging markets ETF and a developed markets ETF. So, here you go, feel free to buy these yourself and avoid a “very small fee” of x.x%, which will eventually cost you thousands of dollars. Also, if you don’t know how or feel like it is too complicated to buy ETFs yourself, don’t worry, it’s really not that hard. We’ll try to find you the most simple how-to video at the end of this page.

Fixed income:

• SPDR Portfolio Long Term Treasury ETF (SPTL) – 30%
• Vanguard Short-Term Corporate Bond ETF (VCSH) – 10%

Equity:

• Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (VTI) – 40%
• iShares Core MSCI International Developed Markets ETF (IDEV)- 15%
• iShares Edge MSCI Min Vol Emerging Markets ETF (EEMV) – 5%

If you would like specific examples; these are the ETFs that your robo-advisor investment portfolio will consist of:

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Vanguard provides this simple how-to video on how to buy an ETF or stocks. The process should be very similar with your low-cost broker.

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While we can recognize that the above information might not seem revolutionary we do truly believe that it can help individual investors avoid unnecessary fees. If you did manage to find value in our efforts, we do appreciate a donation in order to continue to provide our work for free