However, all of the things Betterment does for you now would be your responsibility, including asset selection, rebalancing, thinking about how to manage taxes, etc.
The bottom line is that you can do this yourself for less money, but you have to do it all yourself. Betterment offers more convenience for a higher fee.
Vanguard Target Date funds rebalance automatically.
> including asset selection
Vanguard's asset selection is "literally buy everything on the market". Its a dumb strategy, but it seems to work. In particular, Vanguard's total market index will perform by definition the average (minus Vanguard's very low fees).
> how to manage taxes
Its no harder than Betterment. You get a 1099-DIV next year, and then fill out your taxes. Since Vanguard Target Date funds automatically rebalance and everything, its unlikely that you get any benefits from Betterment.
I disagree with some of the Boglehead stuff, but the wiki is a good resource.
You don't need to do any trial and error. You just need to pick some funds and hold onto them for a long time. The funds Betterment has already picked for you are probably pretty good.
(In fairness, they do some other stuff which is more value-added like TLH, which is more work to do yourself, but again, it's hard to justify the 0.25%.)
"If You Can" by William Berstein is a good, short ebook on this subject.
I got the Wealthfront pitch when I started with my employer, but I feel much better with my current arrangement. Your comment "I have very little choice but to stay put" is never nice to hear in any context, so I hope you can move along from that place.
Just felt like pointing out that you'd have to rebalance the same way Betterment does, which isn't the way I believe normal people do it. Betterment uses portfolio optimization techniques that can be hard to implement yourself: https://www.betterment.com/resources/investment-strategy/por...
Those fees were on top of the ETF fees for the funds they assembled your portfolio with.
If you don't want to even rebalance, then go buy one of the target date funds from the likes of Vanguard.
TLH is extremely oversold. I don't need to repeat what is easily found in a google search though.
