The Plan: Non-Retirement Portfolio

What I am proposing is a plan for building a broadly diversified collection of mutual funds with automatic monthly investments in a non-retirement account. It is my hope that this is a good plan for me as someone with little to no credit card debt, reasonably stable income and living comfortably below my means. I also do not want to spend a great deal of time researching and staying on top of individual stocks and bonds. This is a plan for growing wealth, not generating additional income. It is a plan for long-term investing.

If I did not have the income to invest at least $300 per month- this would not be a good approach. I will be choosing funds that charge no fee to purchase. There are funds in every sector I will pick that would be better options if I had a fixed amount of money I wanted to invest in a specific fund all at once. I am limiting my choices to funds that will allow automatic investing because I believe that the discipline of contributing consistently will mean I invest more and the benefit of investing over time through market peaks and valleys will help reduce the negative impact of buying during a market peak.

Each mutual fund will have a minimum investment amount to initially purchase the fund and each fund I choose will have $100 or less additional investment minimum. This plan should work for me as long as I can add between $300 and $2500 per month (That is a big range, but I am serious about building wealth. It should work for me if my financial situation improves meaning if I can invest $300 per month now and can bump that up to $500 later, it should work well. It should be scalable. It should allow me to add additional funds slowly as I save the additional money needed to add each new fund.

If I could invest more than $2500 per month, but still do not want to get more active than this in managing my own investments, I would probably research and hire a good financial planner or advisor. Some will argue that I should do this anyway and some will argue that if I have over $500 I should do this. I am not recommending that you do anything. I hope to build a plan that will build a diversified portfolio of funds that should be a relatively low maintenance way to invest over the long term without stressing about timing the market.