Talk to The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing is Taylor Larimore, Mel Lindauer, and Michael LeBoeuf's practical manual for implementing John Bogle's investment philosophy in a complete financial plan. The Bogleheads are the community of investors who follow Bogle's principles — low costs, broad diversification, long-term holding — and who gather on an online forum that began at Morningstar and moved to its own site. The book distills the forum's collective wisdom into a comprehensive guide covering everything from first principles to specific account types to withdrawal strategies in retirement.
The book's approach is explicitly simple and deliberately unpretentious. The authors do not claim to help readers beat the market; they claim to help readers earn the market return with minimal cost and maximum reliability. The core portfolio recommendation is a three-fund portfolio: a total US stock market index fund, a total international stock market index fund, and a total bond market index fund. The proportions depend on age, time horizon, and risk tolerance, but the structure is the same for almost everyone.
What it gets right
- 1.
The three-fund portfolio — total US stock market, total international stock market, total bond market — handles the investment need for most people with minimal complexity.
- 2.
Asset allocation between stocks and bonds is the most important portfolio decision. Everything else (which funds, which brokerage) is secondary.
- 3.
Tax efficiency requires using the right account for each type of holding. Tax-inefficient assets belong in tax-advantaged accounts; tax-efficient assets can go in taxable accounts.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Taylor Larimore is a retired World War II veteran and long-time Vanguard investor who became the informal leader of the Bogleheads community, an online forum of investors following John Bogle's principles. He co-authored The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing with Mel Lindauer, a retired financial planner, and Michael LeBoeuf, a retired professor of management. Larimore, born in 1924, began investing in Vanguard index funds in 1986 and has been one of the most consistent public advocates for the Boglehead approach. He has met and corresponded extensively with Bogle and has been described by Bogle himself as "the Dean of the Bogleheads." A second edition of the book was published…
