BND
Vanguard Total Bond Market
stock NASDAQ ETF

If they’re happy with the investments the bank has them in, they can find out what those investments are (S&P? BND? 60/40?) and use that to guide their investments in a brokerage for a lot less money.

You can transfer to Vanguard and have a vanguard advisor manage/allocate it for 0.3% fee. They’ll most likely use VTI + VXUS + BND and overall the costs will be a lot lower than before.

BND? Morwe crucial (IMHO) is the allocation

Yes maybe VT for stocks and BND for bonds would give you a closer mix to what you have now at near zero fees. Don’t worry about the difference between low cost and zero cost. VT has expenses but they are so low they might as well be zero and they will cut them further when they can.

Your portfolio looks great. It's something that one could stick with their whole life and probably do okay. There are even all-in-one single funds that are basically that portfolio like AOA or VASGX, but doing it in separate funds saves a tiny bit of money in expense ratio.
The 20% BND might be on the conservative side: most target date funds for someone your age have around 10%. Risk tolerance is a personal thing. This online quiz seems to be pretty good at getting a ballpark estimate: [https://www.investmentriskquiz.com/](https://www.investmentriskquiz.com/)
Make sure you're using tax-advantaged accounts before putting money into a taxable brokerage. Follow the [The Money Guy's FOO](https://moneyguy.com/guide/foo/) or the r/personalfinance Prime Directive: Both are basically:
1. Make a budget
2. Pay your minimum payments on all debt
3. Make an emergency fund
4. Get the company match in your 401k/403b if it has one
5. Pay off high interest debt
6. Fill your HSA if eligible
7. Fill your Roth IRA until it's maxed
8. Fill your 401k until it's maxed
9. etc.

For context: Mid 50s, $800k ($400k is in 401k) rest is ready to go into brokerage, unless there is other tax advantaged accounts that i can get into that i’m unaware of (income is above $200k).
Still unsure of bond allocation, but i know it’ll be 50/50 split of equities and bonds. Most of the bond allocation will likely go to BND, but i want to hear opinions.
Like many on here say, trying to treat all accounts as one portfolio, and to my knowledge having almost all bonds and maybe VXUS in the 401k makes the most sense for tax advantages, please let me know if i’m wrong.
Happy to hear suggestions. I know VOO overlaps, it’s intentional.

BND sucks , don’t buy bond funds period, they trade like equities . Buy bonds , TBills and CDs, hold to maturity . You get your full principal back plus a guaranteed return . Oh by the way, you also pay a management expense in those stupid bond funds,

Have you factored in the income generated from BND into the last 6 yr performance? If you weren’t reinvesting dividends then your performance might look skewed.

Not bad. This should do fine over the long run.
I would personally not invest in bonds (BND) unless I was closer to retirement, or I wanted to lower my portfolio's volatility, and would prefer to add to my international small cap value exposure with AVDV for (hopefully) better returns over the long run. You can visualise past portfolio performance on portfolio visualizer or testfolio, if you want to compare how different portfolios performed in past market conditions.

I, too, found BND confusing. When I first bought BND, I thought it was closer to something like iShares GOVT. But then I did research on the holdings and discovered that US Treasuries are only half of the holdings. The other half is a mix of corporate bonds, mortgage bonds (including government-backed), and some other stuff. You can see the summary breakdown here:
[https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profile/bnd#portfolio-composition](https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profile/bnd#portfolio-composition)
If you pull down the full holdings list, it's pretty huge! If you switch over to Vanguard's institutional site, you'll see more holdings details including the option to download the full spreadsheet:
[https://institutional.vanguard.com/investments/product-details/fund/0928](https://institutional.vanguard.com/investments/product-details/fund/0928)
(With the current website design, you go to Portfolio tab, then Holding details section, then Bonds tab, then EXPORT DATA in top right. There are currently 17,000 rows in there.)
In my view, BND is meant to be held for a very long time. Like 10+ years. Ideally 20+ years. As part of a broader portfolio strategy. And, as you'll read on Bogleheads wiki, there is a conventional wisdom in Bogleheads circles that BND moves in a different direction of something like VTI in a downturn. But that wasn't true during recent drawdowns, due to interest rate environment. So it caused a lot of people to second-guess their BND holdings.
If you thought BND was more like a cash reserve, you could take a look at US Treasury ETFs. If what you are looking for is something that is cash-like, but that earns you your "fair share of interest" from the US government, and doesn't move too much during equity drawdowns of Fed rate decisions, but without the complexity of directly buying US Treasuries from TreasuryDirect or the secondary market, then US Treasury ETFs are for you. That problem is solved, if you want it to be, by a set of ETF tickers.
A trio of tickers works well, in particular, one from iShares and two from Vanguard: SGOV, VGSH, and VGIT. These cover ultra-short, short-term, and intermediate-term treasuries, respectively.
You can think of them on a price volatility spectrum, where VGIT is meant to be held longer because its price can move a quite a bit in response to interest rate environment or overall bond market. VGIT doesn't move as much as BND, though, because the duration of treasuries it holds cap out at 10 years. VGSH has a lower volatility, since the duration of the holdings is more short-term (caps out at 3 years) vs VGIT. And most stable of all is SGOV -- it seeks to maintain a stable value, ex dividends, throughout its life. It's basically a cash-equivalent since it doesn't hold anything with a longer duration than 3 months. Just note that this trio isn't really giving you "diversification away from equities." Instead, it's just giving you low-complexity exposure to the US Treasury market, basically a cash reserve and US government interest management tool.
Vanguard doesn't offer an SGOV equivalent, I think because the expense ratio would be too high for their taste, due to the high turnover. And because they probably prefer you hold short-term cash in something like a Vanguard Cash Plus account (HYSA), or their VMFXX money market fund. Which works pretty much as well, but with a different set of tradeoffs.
But if you hold VGIT, VGSH, and SGOV, you cover a good part of the US Treasury yield curve (1 month - 10 years), and then you just need to decide whether you'd prefer to hold a larger share of short-term treasuries (tracks interest rates closely in yields, which means if the Fed cuts rates to 0%, SGOV will yield 0% in short order) or longer-term ones (blends the yield of interest rates over a longer time period, which means it'll behave more like a moving average of the interest rates over time).

If OP is 5 years out from retirement (if I read the post right), the risks posed by future inflation to long nominal bonds are significant compared to the intermediate term BND.
OP, If some form of inflation protection (TIPS, I-Bond) isn't in the diversified portfolio to complement the BND, this may be good thing to consider as part of your rebalancing. A general "we don't know where inflation will go" position leads some to recommend your bond position be more 50/50 on nominal/TIPS as you head into the last stretch to retirement.

For now, I use I-bonds for all of my long-term bond allocation. I don't look for growth with I-bonds. I just want to keep up with inflation. Most of our I-bonds have the fixed 1.3% and 1.2% rate where we loaded up on gift boxes for spouses. With I-bonds, I like how taxes are deferred, exempt from state taxes, keep up with inflation, and never go below zero. We have 4 children and qualify for the tax exclusion for tuition for children based on my income or we can do a 529 rollover. My idea going forward is to buy $20k in I-bonds each year for self/spouse after maxing out tax advantaged accounts and Roth IRA. If we do that for the next 10 years, that would slowly increase our bond allocation and we could use I-bonds to cover base living expenses as a bridge from ages 65 to 70 until claiming Social Security. If I claim SS at 70, then SS will cover our base living expenses. All of our stock allocation for retirement could then be used for discretionary spending. Alternatively, we could use I-bonds for education for children with the tax exclusion for tuition or do a 529 rollover.
I-bonds don't get much attention because Wall Street can't make money off I-bonds. I-bonds have a $10k annual limit which is a big barrier, but with some long-term planning, a married couple can put a significant amount in I-bonds. You can also use trusts, gift box, or business to buy more. There are some limits with I-bonds. Using the TD interface is fine for me.
For estate planning, my wife and I have registrations of "husband and wife." I realize that if we have more than $100k in each account, then a probate will be required in case of simultaneous death of both spouses (we're not there yet). My wife has instructions to change registrations to add adult children as "and" or POD beneficiary after my death.
While past performance is no guarantee of future performance, I-bonds outperformed VTIP and BND in the last 10 years. If you invested $10k in I-bonds on 1/1/2014, then on 1/1/2024, you would have $13,328 in I-bonds, $12,840 in VTIP, and $11,202 in BND.
Personal finance is indeed personal. I-bonds are not for everyone. But for me and my wife, we like I-bonds.
I also like VTIP, TIPS, and bond ladders. I am not a huge fan on BND. In 2022, BND was down 9.5%. I don't want that for my bond allocation where I just want to preserve capital.

What kind of account is this? If it’s a retirement account, it’s too early for BND. I agree with the other commenter- drop the single shares. You are covered with VOO. If it’s a brokerage account, I can see why you may want BND to have some stable capital in there.

just think of BND as a pile of cash…
(mentally) put it in the same category as a bank account…
think equities as your “real investment”
do you want/need such a pile of cash?
not everything is about investment strategy…not every dollar has to be “put to work” earning more dollars…
it’s a personal decision…no right or wrong…

31M married, no kids, max 403b yearly. Should I be investing in BND now?

You don’t have to calculate the yield. If you search for BND in Vanguard’s webpage it will tell you its yield to maturity.
With bonds, when you refer about its “yield”, you usually refer to its “yield to maturity” which not only includes interest payments, but also its expected capital appreciation by the time they mature.
Remember that you can buy bonds at face value, at a discount or even pay a premium. For example three bonds with the same duration may have a 5% coupon a 4% coupon and a 3% coupon. In that case, you may pay a premium for the first one, buy the second one at face value and buy the third one at a discount. They could all have the same yield, but you will get it differently. You will get higher interest payments with the first one, but the price of the bond will ho down as it reaches maturity (you always get the face value when bonds mature, so if you buy it a premium, the price will fall as a it reaches maturity). You will get all of your yield through interest payments with the second one. With the third one, you will get less interest payments but the bond will go up in price through time.
In the case of BND, the yield to maturity is 4.5% but its average coupon is 3.7%. That means that it mainly holds bonds that your buying at a discount and that you will get a portion of your return through capital appreciation as the bonds go up in price as they reach maturity.
On the other hand, it’s not always smart to compare the yield of bonds and cash. If cash is yielding more than intermediate bonds (or something similar), that only means that the market expects interest rates to fall. With bonds you loco your yield until the mature. With cash, interest rates could go down at any moment. BND has an effective maturity of around 8 years. Whatever you buy today, will yield around 4.5% during that timeframe. Cash, if the market is right, will probably end up yielding less during that timeframe.

35 F from the States, just started investing, Would this be a good to start off with? Keeping it fairly simple but also hoping for good diversification. Hoping for long term growth, fairly passive.
* **60% VOO**
* **20% VXUS**
* **10% AVUV**
* **10% BND**
Thanks!

Is BND at or near 4% though? It seems, maybe so, but I’m not good at calculating it. My main question is often, lately (past 1-2 years since I began) whether BND is a better yield vs the default money market with Fidelity which is basically 4% and has been since …mid 2023 at least. So I guess they’re both roughly equal, at least for now? Sometimes when I try to calculate BND’s real annual yield based on my monthly dividend from it, it’s closer to 3%.
Edit: BND yields 3.68% according to yahoo finance so I guess that answers my own question … still a little confusing but maybe I’m just really new to investing.

BND or FXNAX and chill, invest T bills for short term needs

\^ This. OP, look at the historical performance of BND, it doesn't just go up, there have been some significant drops. Maybe a 12 month CD is the highest rate you can get on money that you need in one to two years, otherwise sgov or a hysa.