Re foreign equity funds:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/01/16/investing-international-funds/21825245/
Both supports (sort of) and modulates what Sven posted. As OAKIX and SGOIX are closed, recommendations are interesting.
Wagg has moved on to other venues.

I wonder if defined maturity bond indexes could be made to work in the mix? Not the HY varieties, but rather the corp bond varieties. They better allow for more discrete control of duration, and have reduced volatility, vis-a-vis conventional bond indexes of comparable maturities. Or would this lead to "being too cute by half," a bunch of extra work and not getting all that much more from it?
http://www.etf.com/sections/etf-issuer-perspective/defined-maturity-indexes-combining-best-attributes-bonds-and-funds?nopaging=1
https://indexes.nasdaqomx.com/Home/BulletShares?source=ETFcombs
I'm thinking here of the BulletShare 0-3yr corp bond index (maybe combined with 0-3 and/or 0-5yr corp Ladder index). Something like that; pick the proportions for each.
update/add-on: conceptually, I would be looking at an allotment to these as a CD-substitute. I haven't checked out their yields; if they suck, then what would be the point? However, if they are equal or better, then advantage to the ETF; and, unlike the CD, you could redeem them whenever, if interest rates rose and you wanted to change course, without penalty (assuming the underlying index hadn't changed too much in value).

FYI: Long-term bond investment had an impressive 2014 to the supremacy of risk-off trade sentiments in the wake of global growth concerns. On the other hand, short-term bonds gave a rather tepid show last year on speculations that the Fed would hike interest rates soon.
Short end of the yield curve rose faster than the long end, and the spread between both yields narrowed to start 2015 as well. Though flattening of the curve is expected to be witnessed once the Fed hikes key rates, volatility is buoyant in the bond market (read: Profit from a Flattening Yield Curve with This ETF).
Regards,
Ted
http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/175990/totl-hits-500-million-in-aum
M* Snapshot TOTL: http://www.morningstar.com/etfs/ARCX/TOTL/quote.html
TOTL Is Unranked In The (GB) ETF Fund Category By U. S. News & World Report::
http://money.usnews.com/funds/etfs/general-bond-funds/spdr-doubleline-total-return-tactical-etf/totl

Reviving an older thread: I uncovered a M* Fund Times May 1, 2015, article on management shakeup at Acorn Funds. Robert Mohn is retiring (unexpectedly) as domestic chief investment officer in 4th quarter 2015, and several experienced analysts left in 2013-2015. M* is putting the Acorn funds under review.
Recent poor performance of ACRNX led to about 40% of assets being withdrawn in 12 months leading up to May 1 article.
Link, must sign in to view:
http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=696099

@JohnC, For cash sleeve here are my thinking:
1. Saving accounts pay little (actually negative after inflation) but they are flexible.
2. Short term investment grade bonds yield 1.5 - 1.6%. VFSUX and VSCSX for example. Minimal duration impact from rising rates.
3. Balanced funds yield > 2.5%. Prefer VWIAX, but higher risk with intermediate term bond exposure (65% in the fund).
@Bee, thanks for sharing your insights.

Bee, I imagine that you would probably have to pay an adviser to have access to the cheapest share class. One way of getting in cheaper would be to buy the short term bond fund (2.5% load), and then transfer your shares over to the fund that you want. Those would still be A shares at Fidelity, but at least the load would be lower.

This fund company seems to take the flavor vanilla and slice it 12 ways to Sunday.
A mere one fund is offered also as:

I compared AMCPX and RAFGX. RAFGX is a R6 shares class has a low minimum (as they all do) and an ER that is half the A share class (AMCPX). AMCPX also comes with a 5% load.
How do investors make a choice between all these flavors?
I'm looking for a brokerage platforms that offer the cheapest share class of American Funds that offers these shares NTF (No Transaction Fee). R6 share (in this case RAFGX) seem to be the cheapest through my brokerage, but I have to cough up the transaction fee.

Actually, the paper seems to say something a bit different.
All else being equal (i.e. same fund family, similar "size, value, and momentum scores"), the researchers found no meaningful difference in pre-tax performance between tax-managed and non-tax-managed funds.

The average before-tax return is very similar for tax-managed funds and non-tax managed funds (0.27% vs. 0.26% per month). ... The average before-tax return is not significantly different between exchange-traded funds and matched open-ended index funds (0.50% vs. 0.51% per month).

Aside from keeping turnover lower (and hence costs lower), other techniques used by tax-managed funds tend to limit what a fund can do and thus potentially impede pre-tax performance. Quoting from the paper's abstract:

Mutual funds can reduce the tax burdens of their shareholders by avoiding securities that are heavily taxed and by avoiding realizing capital gains that trigger higher tax burdens to the funds’ investors. Such tax avoidance strategies constrain the investment opportunities of the mutual funds and might reduce their before-tax performance.

The abstract continues: "Surprisingly, more tax-efficient mutual funds do not underperform other funds before taxes, indicating that the constraints imposed by tax-efficient asset management do not have significant performance consequences." Emphasis added. That is, the conclusion is only that tax-managed funds don't do worse, not that they do better.
What improves pre-tax performance is not tax-efficiency, but keeping trading costs down (a side effect of minimizing trading to keep realized gains down). So look directly for funds with low trading costs
There are lots of papers that discuss trading costs. Brokerage fees can be found in SAIs, and should correlate well with turnover ratios. Market impact is likely affected by how much of a company a fund owns. ISTM that these are the factors that one should be looking at, not tax-efficiency, which is at best a proxy for these costs.

I keep about two years of cash within my portfolio as a safety net plus the portfolio itself kicks off enough income to meet my current annual withdrawal needs. Any cash held above ten percent, for me, would be considered excess and held due market conditions. Therefore, I am presently 10% cash heavy due to market conditions at 20%. And, I could still raise another 15% within the cash area while remaining invested towards the low end of my asset allocation ranges for the income, growth & income, and growth areas by reducing equites from 50% to 40% and other from 10% to 5%. I think most every investor needs to know where they can best raise cash within their portfolio should they need to do so.

Edit: You are lucky to have a pension. Shouldn't you be just fine once you begin taking SS? You may still have a little out of pocket but not much. I assume that will come from your nest egg?

I'm looking at taking SS at 63.5. That would give me 13 years where I don't have to touch my dividends/interest/principal. If I buy a new truck it is 8-9 years. This is another, example of what we both said before - How do people without a pension or a large investment account pay their bills??????????

Dex: Checking/int $753. How do you manage this?
Derf

That's checking balance and interest from STHBX for the remainder of the year.

A while back I bought into a income fund that is multi asset in nature. My thinking on this was a place to park money for the short term before it goes into cash instead. For example, if I keep 12 months cash available, I would have 3-5 years in this fund to temper any hiccups in the markets.
Anyone else use a similar strategy? It could be a form of bucket or sleeve investing of sorts.

Seems like a reasonable approach.
Instead of thinking that there might be market hiccups I try to plan on the hiccups happening during my draw down periods. I try to do this by using back testing (historical data). You can explore mutual fund MaxDD and recovery from Max DD here at MFO thanks to Charles' efforts using this tool here.
A website I visit to back test mutual funds is Portfolio Visualizer. I'm attempting to get a close approximation of future "MaXDD" (Maximum Draw Down) of different mutual funds or etfs (cash can be entered as CASHX). This site lets you enter your mutual funds as individual holdings (100%) or as a combination of fund percentages (which also must add up to 100%). When reviewing the results I pay close attention to this feature (which you have to hover over with your cursor to open...located next to the MaxDD results). It looks like this:

At this website:
https://portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio
Max DD is expressed in a percentage and recovery time from MaxDD is expressed in a time frame it took the fund to overcome MaxDD (return to profitability for a buy and hold investor).
On a separate note:
I would argue that cash has a Max DD equal to inflation that can be measure in percentage and time. This might be the most misunderstood MaxDD...the buying power of cash. When you get down to it this is what we all are trying to do preserve or increase... buying power.
My portfolio often feels like a balloon that changes in size, but needs to at least overcome the deflationary pressures of inflationary leaks (the buying power of money).

A while back I bought into a income fund that is multi asset in nature. My thinking on this was a place to park money for the short term before it goes into cash instead. For example, if I keep 12 months cash available, I would have 3-5 years in this fund to temper any hiccups in the markets.
Anyone else use a similar strategy? It could be a form of bucket or sleeve investing of sorts.

FYI: Most of us don't worry about taxes when it comes to mutual funds.
We don't need to because we invest in them through a 401(k), IRA or another account designed to delay taxes until after retirement. More than half of all money invested in mutual funds is in tax-deferred accounts. That makes it easy to ignore whether other shareholders in the same fund are getting a big tax bill just because they're holding it in a taxable account.
Even so, it can pay to consider a mutual fund's tax history, regardless of whether your money is in a taxable or tax-deferred account. That's because funds that keep tax bills down tend to have better returns, even before taxes are taken into account.
Regards,
Ted
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/print?id=31217658

FYI: WHEN Ken Kavula of Genesee, Mich., retired from his job as a high school principal at age 53, he decided to defy conventional wisdom and manage his own financial life — including his retirement accounts and a mix of stocks and bonds he had either accumulated on his own or inherited.
Fifteen years later, Mr. Kavula, now 68, has ridden the huge highs and crushing lows of the markets so well that he has enough to live off, for now, without even tapping some accounts.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/23/your-money/the-risks-and-rewards-of-self-managing-investment-portfolios.html

Dex, STHBX a dog of a dog. In the same short term junk arena it is completely outclassed by ASHDX and OSTIX.

I was going to suggest a combination of OSTIX and WHIYX.
ASHDX has a short history from what I have researched.

Bee, I was in (and out) of WHIYX many times over the years. But it has never been the same since they lost their high profile fund manager. Now I am in and much prefer PHYTX. It has been a nice steady performer year in and year out compared to its peers. RIMOX is an interesting junk/bank loan fund. It has been an outperformer since they shook up their management team by adding several new ones. Everyone pretty much hates junk and have been warning of their high risks. But YTD some are up close to 5%.

FWIW, my take on the 9th Circuit ruling, the SC ruling (which only had to do with statutes of limitations, i.e. time limits on claims), and on people's wishful thinking.
The 9th circuit ruled that revenue sharing is generally okay (though it is fact-specific, and can vary from case to case). Revenue sharing is where the mutual funds pay the Plan's administrative service provider (bookkeeper), and the service provider in turn reduces the fees it charges to the Plan Sponsor (employer). Basically, employees paying 12b-1 fees to cover some of the plan's administrative costs, so that the employer pays less.
Without going into the subissues or reasoning, I'll just quote from the 9th Circuit opinion: "Today we have held that the [revenue sharing] practice here did not violate the terms of the Edison Plan or violate ERISA § 406(b)(3) [prohibiting kickbacks]."
The 9th circuit also ruled that for the funds that were added (in 2002) to the plan within ERISA's 6 year statute of limitations, using retail class shares was a breach of fiduciary duty. But not for the reason you think. The reason was not that they were more expensive than institutional class shares, but that the employer had not even bothered to check whether there were cheaper shares available.
Quoting again from that ruling:

The trial evidence ... shows that an experienced investor would have reviewed all available share classes and the relative costs of each when selecting a mutual fund. ... [W]e have little difficulty agreeing with thedistrict court that Edison did not exercise the “care, skill,prudence, and diligence under the circumstances” that ERISA demands in the selection of these retail mutual funds.

As to the SC ruling, it was (based on ERISA being modeled after trust law) that the employer/sponsor has an ongoing duty to monitor the plan offerings. So the 6 year statute of limitations runs not from the original selection of a fund, but from the time it should have last taken a look at the plan offerings. Thus the suit could proceed.
But the SC also said that (a) it had no opinion on what constituted that duty to monitor (it could be a lesser duty than in making the original fund selections), and (b) whether the plaintiffs could even argue this (because they had not argued that the defendants breached a duty to monitor distinct from the duty to carefully select the funds).
All the SC did was remand to the 9th Circuit to figure out whether the plantiffs would be permitted (procedurally) to argue for a breach of monitoring duty, and if so, what that duty was and whether the defendant actually breached it.
With respect to what people are reading into this case - the SC gave no particular reason for hope. Any ruling about share classes or share costs was decided in the trial court, affirmed in the circuit court, and not appealed to the SC. There's no open issue here on which to be hoping for anything better than was already decided.

Dex: Checking/int $753. How do you manage this?
Derf

I've been posting a lot about budgeting, near cash, and cash flow.
Here is my current cash flow calculation for this year as of today's date.
Budget (28,500)
Cash Back 243 - credit cards
checking/Int 753
STHBX 16,449
Money Market 1,700
Pension 8,058
Spent 12,494 - this the amount spent to date
Total 11,197 - this is the amount remaining of STHBX I estimate I will have at year end.
I could show you future years but basically it is a adding in dividends and reducing STHBX until SS begins.
This is the first year that the pension kicked in.
Get back to basics with your planning. But, as I said before, the younger a person, the less likely they will be able to have a comfortable retirement.

Thank you MJG and msf for the time and thought you put into your replies. I was unclear with the article in regard to the word fee/fees . I thought Mr. Evensky was trying to focus the writer on the 15-20% improvement on the portfolio return net of portfolio fees , taxes, and inflation. If a were a client , I would be considering my total return ( risk adjusted as Mr. Evensky advises ) which would include Mr. Evensky's approximate 1.33% fee, all in, as given by the writer. I was thinking, as I read , that the word fees as used by Mr. Evensky meant portfolio expense ratios/transaction costs but did not include his and Mr. Katz's 1.33% fee.