re: OT- Cooking the Books

Some of the advice here is scary... to be fair, your investment goals and risk tolerance are not nearly clear enough for anyone to be giving blanket investment advice without major caveats.

That being said, sound like you may like a solid low fee diversified dividend etf? (SDY for example) not sure why you want to be weighted more heavily towards REIT exposure exactly but there are plenty of good REIT ETFs with low expense ratios as well (VNQ).

Also the debate on whether "cash is king" totally depends on your liquidity needs and your current progress with maxing out your tax-advantages accounts. Roth IRA principal can be pulled quickly and penalty free anytime though.


Check out something like bogleheads.com forum for actual advice, I'm sure variations on your question has been asked and discussed much more rigorously on there multiple times.