<prompt> Human: Have you ever wondered if your retirement portfolio was too conservative? Perhaps too aggressive? Maybe you just shoved all your investments into a Target Date fund and didnt worry about it? This post is for you. Im 100 sure this isnt a new concept, but here we go anyway. Introducing, the copy paste portfolio.The idea is that if you have no idea what youre doing as far as fund picks or allocation percentages, you can simply look at the numbers from a Target Date fund which has the year you would like to retire. Lets use the Vanguard 2055 Target Date Fund as an example VFFVX From this pie chart you can see that VFFVX has:- A 9010 stock bond split- 54 Total Stock Market Index, 36 International, 7 Total Bonds and 3 International Bonds- An equivalent portfolio would be: 54 VTSMX, 36 VGTSX, 7 VTBIX, and 3 VTIBX- You would then take some of the more expensive index funds and replace them with cheaper funds that serve the same or similar purpose. For instance, I would replace VTSMX Total Stock Market, 0.14 ER with VFIAX tracks SP500, 0.04 ER. This will take a bit more know-how and a little bit of research, but if you get totally lost Id recommend checking in with a fee-only fiduciary advisor or making a post on this forum :Edit to add: What is the benefit of manually picking funds instead of just investing in a Target Date fund? Target Date funds often have a little bit higher expense ratios compared to lower cost index funds. One could copy the performance of their preferred Target Date for a lower cost using the same or similar index funds.Edit 2: Ive been told that for this specific example, exactly simulating this Target Date fund using its equivalent index funds would actually have a bigger expense ratio. Revision incoming. Edit 3: added last bullet pointId love to hear some thoughts on this idea in the comments and perhaps your success stories with using a copy paste portfolio. Have a great day, all!  <response>: This may be obvious, but I would also point out that you also need to re-balance your portfolio every so often. The target date fund will change its allocations over time. Youll also get out of sync naturally as the stocksbonds increasedecease at different percentages. The benefit of buying a target date fund is that this is done automatically. 