J.L. Collins

And my answer is no.

I mean, theirs is fine.

A total stock market index fund is pretty much a total stock market index fund.

The second kind of question I get around this is somebody will say, you know, I'm looking at my 401k and there is no total stock market index fund option.

There is, however, this thing called an S&P 500 fund.

Is that okay?

And the answer to that is yes, absolutely.

That's the fund Jack Bogle himself started with, and that was the fund he used for all of his life.

These things are cap weighted, which simply means the largest companies make up the greatest percentage of the fund.

So the total stock market fund is largely the S&P 500 fund.

I want to say it's maybe 80, 85%.

And if you track those two funds performance-wise over time, they track very, very closely.

So then the question becomes, okay, why aren't you in the S&P 500 fund?

And my answer to that is, well, for the same reason I put Tabasco on my eggs.

I like a little extra kick that the small percentage of small cap and mid cap give me.

And then the third question out of this grouping is, well, what about the ETF versions, right?

So ETFs are exchange traded funds and VTSAX, the ETF version of that, all these letters, I'm going to confuse myself, is VTI.

Yes, that's absolutely fine.

It's the same portfolio.

It's just a slightly different way to own it.