<prompt> Human: I left my work 5 years ago to nurture my kids. I think my 5-year time was worth sacrificing in terms of dedicating myself to my children, but at the same time, I often felt depressed and lost my self-confidence as a career woman. In that sense, my husband and I came to decide to hire a babysitter, so I could come back to work.At my new work place, my new employer suggested me to invest in 401k, but I am not familiar with any sort of financing at all. Even though my husband holds a 401k, he cannot give me any meaningful advice since he, too, is not paying much attention to his investment.My company plan offers me 41 holdings : 34 stock funds, 6 bond funds, 1 other fund. And Id like to make a lazy portfolio with my 401k; a question is, how to choose appropriate funds?Here are my personal information to take into consideration when you give me some comments My age: early thirties Income: 50,000 salary Preferred account type: 401k Matching: 15 on the first 5 Other savings or investments: 10 months of emergency fund Any advice or idea are appreciated on both the fund choices and the allocation. Thank you.  <response>: Your employers plan is filled with a lot of expensive actively managed funds, which is unfortunately typical with a lot of 401k and other Defined Contribution plans. Only one stock fund and a handful of the bond funds have fund expense ratios below that of the Target Date funds that are offered. Unless you have significant amounts of retirement assets outside your 401k plan where you can allocate your assets across accounts and effectively treat it as one big portfolio, youll probably be best served by investing in a single Target Date fund that matches your risk tolerance.If youre going to select one of the Target Date funds, dont simply pick the fund with the date closest to the date you turn 65. You need to figure out your risk tolerance - that is, how much stock market volatility you can stomach while still sleeping well at night. Over the long run, a higher percentage of bonds in your portfolio generally results in lower overall volatility and risk, but also lower expected returns. A 90 stock 10 bond portfolio is considered an extremely aggressive portfolio, whereas a 20 stock 80 bond portfolio is about as conservative as you can get. While the general rule of thumb is to set your bond allocation between age and age - 10, various factors could place your asset allocation beyond these bounds - for instance, if you intend to retire early, you may want to be more conservative, whereas if you have a large portfolio but live an extremely frugal lifestyle, you may be able to stomach more risk. Keep in mind that you also need to ensure that your asset allocation isnt so aggressive that you panic and sell during downturns; what would you do if the stock market went down 10 in a week, or even 30?Also, something you may want to confirm with your plan fiduciary this is someone who works at your company, not the company that holds the 401k assets, but many of the funds in your 401k plan have front-end loads fees to buy into the fund when purchased commercially; while most 401k plans waive loads, I have seen a few instances where theyre not. If you are in fact subject to loads, you should absolutely not contribute anything above 5.Take some time to read the links that the AutoModerator posted, along with the wiki article on Investing 