[jively]

If you are going with portfolio C, 80% stock, you might consider:

16% Vanguard Total Stock Mkt Idx Inv
16% Vanguard Value Index Fund Inv
8% Vanguard Small-Cap Index Fund Inv
8% Vanguard Small-Cap Value Index
8% Vanguard REIT Index Fund Inv
8% Vanguard European Stock Index Inv
8% Vanguard Pacific Stock Index Inv
8% Vanguard Emerging Mkts Stk Idx Inv
10% Vanguard Short-Term Bond Index Inv
10% Vanguard Inter-Term Bond Index Inv

The Total Stock market fund is mostly large cap, is more tax efficient that the other large cap funds, and the extra exposure to small does not hurt you.

If you are in a high tax bracket, you might consider a municipal bond fund instead of these taxable fund, although it should still be short or intermediate term.

Since you are starting with $100K, each of the purchases will be over Vanguard's $3,000 minimum. (For people starting with less money, you could start a similar but simpler allocation with fewer funds, and use the full allocation when your portfolio is large enough.)

Since you are in this for the long term, you could buy your initial allocation in one lump sum. The market may move up or down over the next 1, 3, 12 months. Since I advocate not making forecasts, I won't consider any forecasts. However, if you think you might feel "stupid" if you buy the whole lump sum, and the market moves down over the next few months, you could buy your initial allocation over some period of time, using an unemotional dollar-cost averaging. Maybe buy 1/3 today, buy the next 1/3 in 2 months, and the last 1/3 in 4 months. That's really up to you.

I'll talk about the $5K monthly and rebalancing in the final post.

-Tom