Me (25M) and my wife (28F) have no debt except our mortgage which is $1,821 a month and then our bills/insurance. We make around $10,000-$11,000 a month and have $30,000 sitting in our savings account from selling our first house rn. I receive a 2% raise every year and a few major bumps here and there to account for the market in my career, while her business is steadily growing more and more (she makes almost double what I do). We plan on doubling our mortgage every month towards the principal with an extra $1,821, then use an extra $2,000 a month to invest, and use the rest on wants like renovating our house, traveling, ect and throwing whatever is left for the month in a HYSA. The goal is the hopefully retire within the next 20 years and living off of our investments and my wife’s business while she takes a back seat and lets her employees bring us income (she co-owns a dog grooming and boarding business but just hired 2 more groomers) and slowly move a percentage of our investments into bonds as we get closer to retirement.
I’m still in the beginning stages of my research on investing but basically my question is, would just investing the $2,000 into VOO and VTI right now be good for our situation and goals?
What’s the downside to investing everything into VOO and VTI?
byu/YaBoiCade ininvesting
Posted by YaBoiCade
32 Comments
Nothing. That is how you are supposed to do it.
I think most of us sucks at picking stocks and do not have the patience to trade stocks. Often the return is not much greater than sp500 index and some people end up doing worse than sp500.
Yep. That’s all you need.
Next step is what accounts you have. Good to max your 401k and a Roth IRA and an HSA account. To take advantage of the tax benefits of those accounts. Good to max hers and yours. Then the extra money each month gets invested in a taxable brokerage.
Invest them all in diversified funds like VOO or VTI equivalents.
Some international exposure in your equity portfolio (VXUS) would be worth considering; there’s a long-running debate over the merits thereof, since international has mostly underperformed US over the past couple decades (2025 was a rare exception), and no firm answer, but it does add some geographic and currency diversification.
VTI is a total market fund and duplicates exposure that you would have in VOO (lots of NVDA, for instance). Consider adding international exposure via VXUS.
Make sure you’re contributing at least enough to your 401k (if you have one) to get any company match.
What is the interest rate on your mortgage?
The downside is you are only getting average returns. It’s better to be lucky with individual stock picking although your returns are higher. 98% of traders who stock pick underperform the overall market over the long term.
The downside is extreme overlap and single nation bias. Do VT instead
The down side is that there are better investments for growth out there. The caveat is, you can lose more than you gain chasing it.
VOO and VTI don’t make that much sense together. As a pick one, they are both solid options however there’s significant overlap between the funds. Just look at the holdings for both and you’ll find common US large cap companies.
VOO and VEU makes a lot more sense. VEU is the ex-US world etf. VTI is total world, so including US.
Investing in only VOO and VTI will mean a few things.
The first point being you are entirely equities. This may or may not be viewed as a positive or negative. You take on the risks associated with an all equities portfolio. If you’re not ok with that, then you could diversify into other non-equity assets.
The second point being you are undiversified regionally. Both VOO and VTI are entirely USA focused. The volatility of the portfolio is entirely reliant on how the USA market performs, with a fair focus on large cap stocks. There are considerations around having a home country bias for investing. There is always the possibility that by only investing in a given region, you give up the potential from capturing growth else where, or could be used to offset some volatility.
The downside of putting everything into VTI or VOO is if the market doesn’t continue to go up like it has been. If the broad market sells off then so does your portfolio. That doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea, just a risk to be aware of. At your ages you could stand to be more aggressive, growth oriented investors so it’s not a bad strategy. And if you’re dollar cost averaging every month you’ll smooth out some of the ups and downs.
I’ve been investing since the late 90s, through the dot com bubble and the housing crisis and the COVID crash. After the last few years it’s hard to believe the market will ever do anything but go up, you just need to be prepared for when it doesn’t. Have a plan and stick to it, don’t panic and let time work for you
VOO and VTI are practically the same thing. You aren’t achieving any diversity. Both will go up and down at the same time.
[https://totalrealreturns.com/s/VOO,VTI](https://totalrealreturns.com/s/VOO,VTI)
Being super young with a long term time horizon why not buy the nasdaq. VOO or VTI plus QQQ or the vanguard equivalent if that is what you like.
Missing sections of the market. Sections that might do better when large me caps lag.
There’s nothing wrong with investing everything into ETFs, you’ll almost certainly make a very large sum of money especially with such a long timespan. When people invest in other ETFs like QQQ or even individual stocks, it’s because they believe the higher gains outweigh the higher risks, for a personal example, I am up 80% on Google in the span of last year, versus my ETF position which was only up 22%, I made significantly more on my individual position in Google than I did in my ETFs.
Does that mean though that I went all in on individual stocks now though? Not at all, it took a lot of time researching the position, and I find myself investing more in ETFs as I gain more and more wealth, it’s just an easier way to do it. You’ll reach early retirement with your current strategy it just might not be as quick as you’d like versus if you took more risk.
The downside is psychological, ie panic selling during a bear market
Crap returns. That’s the trade off. The trade off is the larger market always grows but it doesn’t return much. I have individual stocks I am up 200% YTD. I will make a 2-3 day swing trade in an AI stock and make what VTI returns. So while you’re waiting a year for your 10% I made it in three days.
VTI and VOO overlap a lot. VTI consists mostly of VOO plus a smaller percentage of smaller stocks, so it’s a little more diversified, but still strongly correlated. You probably don’t need both, and I’d lean toward VTI out of those two, though it won’t make a big difference either way.
Both of these are exclusively US stocks. Personally, I prefer VT. Which is around 60%+ the same as VTI, so you still get plenty of US exposure, but it also includes international stocks. In recent years, US stocks have performed a lot better, but historically that hasn’t been the case in all time intervals. More international diversification might give you a little more peace of mind if something happens in the US market like the AI bubble popping.
Another area where you might diversify would be bonds. It’s hard to make the case for allocating too much of your portfolio to these given their historical performance vs equities, but some could be a little safer than none if things do go poorly. These might make more sense to go in a retirement account so you’re not paying taxes on the dividends every year.
60% VOO and 40% QQQ until retirement then reevaluate.
Boring
You can’t time the market, but fair warning:
Just don’t forget what came next after the five-year bull market run of the 1990s:
2000: −9.1%
2001: −11.9%
2002: −22.1%
Asset class diversification is missing. Learn the asset classes and invest with knowledge. This is the only protection from an uncertain future.
You miss the Dopamine hit of seeing your portfolio every 5 minutes ( specially if instead of Vti u invested in TSLA, ORCL, RKLB to name a few)
Nothing. The full time pros can’t beat VOO long term. What would make you think a part time investor can?
Lack of diversity. The AI party will stop at some point and you’ll be too exposed
The downside is concentration in the US. Look up the lost decade, and see how international markets did then.
Vti
VOO is fine. And many of the companies in VOO exist world wide, so don’t feel like you need to invest in a historically underperforming global fund for extra international exposure. Believe it or not, the mag seven exists beyond the confines of the USA.
You need international diversification like what VEU offers.
The downside is it’s conservative for someone your age, because you are missing out on the massive potential upside that the top blue chip stocks provide. If you go back to 2000 and you continually bought top blue chip stocks like Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, JP Morgan Chase, and Amazon along with an s&p 500 etf, you would have made substantially more money over that timeframe than if you only bought the s&p 500 etf.
lack of international diversification
Agree about what another commenter said about international exposure. Could sub vti for vt
The downside is that you may go through a couple of recessions between now and retirement, and may see negative growth some years. The good news is that you are far enough away from retirement that your portfolio will recover in time. And as you get closer to retirement, then that will be the time to make decisions about less risky investments.