Your risk tolerance probably isn’t as high as you think. Go back to September of this year or 2008 and be honest with yourself about how you felt. Did you lose sleep worrying about your portfolio? One back-of-the-napkin approach to getting a handle on your risk is to put your age in bonds. If you’re in your early 60s, your portfolio would be like the Vanguard Wellesley fund. It invests 60% in bonds, 40% in equities. The fund is up 7.7% year-to-date and kicks off 3.2% in income. They could call it the sleep-well(esley)-at-night fund.
