Cash. Income. Growth. International. One bet you believe in. Pick one ETF for each job. That's the portfolio. No advisor required.
By Michael Ashley — banking and asset
management, 20+ years
Each slot does one thing. Pick the best fund for that job and leave it alone. The Frame handles the rest.
Diversified index investing beats most active management over time. Low costs matter enormously. Market timing is a losing game for almost everyone. The Frame is built on these foundations.
A dedicated Park slot because "invest everything" is bad advice when rent is due. A Dare slot because pretending investors won't take high-conviction bets doesn't stop them — it just means they do it without a framework.
The Frame allocates differently depending on where you are. In your 20s, Build gets 55% — you have time on your side. In your 60s, Earn gets 40% — your portfolio should be paying you. The Build Your Frame tool handles the math.
Each slot has a Pareto pick — the fund that wins its job for most investors. SGOV for Park. SCHD for Earn. VOO for Build. VXUS for Roam. Dare is yours to choose. Read the analysis if you want the reasoning. Or just use the defaults.
Set a recurring investment in each fund proportional to your target allocation. Check once a year to see if drift has moved any slot more than 5–10 percentage points. Rebalance if it has. That's it. That's the whole system.
| Life stage | Park | Earn | Build | Roam | Dare |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20s | 5% | 10% | 55% | 20% | 10% |
| 30s | 10% | 15% | 45% | 20% | 10% |
| 40s | 10% | 25% | 35% | 20% | 10% |
| 50s | 15% | 30% | 30% | 20% | 5% |
| 60s+ | 20% | 40% | 20% | 15% | 5% |
Starting points, not personalized advice. Adjust to your income, timeline, and risk tolerance.
Early on, Build dominates because compounding needs time. A 25-year-old investing $500 a month in VOO for 35 years has 35 years of market returns working for them. Keeping most of the portfolio in cash or dividend funds at that stage is an expensive form of caution.
As retirement approaches, the math flips. Sequence-of-returns risk becomes real — a bad market in the first three years of retirement can permanently impair a portfolio that's mostly equities. Earn's growing income stream reduces the need to sell Build assets at unfavorable prices. Park ensures there's always dry powder.
The Dare slot never exceeds 10% at any life stage. That's not arbitrary — it's the boundary between a high-conviction bet and a portfolio-altering gamble. Dare is the portfolio's pressure valve. It is not the engine.
Find your allocation →The three-fund portfolio is the gold standard for a reason. Low cost, diversified, easy to maintain. The Frame agrees with the core insight. It diverges on two points: bonds as the safe-money allocation (T-bills are safer and currently yield more), and the absence of a structured high-risk slot.
Robo-advisors automate good behavior — regular investing, rebalancing, tax-loss harvesting. The downside: they build portfolios opaque enough that most investors don't really understand what they own or why. The Frame is transparent by design. Five funds. Five jobs. You can explain it to anyone.
Stock picking is not wrong — it's just hard. The research on individual stock selection versus index funds is not ambiguous. Most active strategies underperform their benchmarks over 10+ years, net of costs and taxes. The Frame gives you the index exposure plus a legitimate outlet for conviction plays in the Dare slot.
Four calculators built specifically for Five Fund Frame investors.
Enter your age and monthly investment. Get your allocation across all five slots with specific fund picks.
Open tool →See what SCHD, VYM, JEPI, or any Earn fund generates at your investment size over your time horizon.
Open tool →Compare the long-term cost of any two funds. See exactly how much a 0.06% difference compounds to over 30 years.
Open tool →Find out what percentage of your portfolio's total risk comes from the Dare slot — and whether that's a bet you're actually comfortable with.
Open tool →M1 Finance lets you build the five slots as a portfolio "pie" and automate monthly investments across all of them — no manual trades, no rebalancing math. $0 commissions, no account minimum.