Talk:Vanguard Financial Planning Services

This article is going to be hard to write, particularly when it comes to characterizing planners' typical recommendations. There are (as far as I'm aware) no publicly available guidelines published for Vanguard's planners, so any information we provide will necessarily be anecdotal. The best we can do, I suppose, is to link to a bunch of forum posts where folks reveal their Vanguard-generated Plans. Ken Schwartz 17:06, 28 May 2008 (EDT)


 * I think the Anecdotal Observations section will be the heart of the article. We just need to avoid total disregard of Wikipedia:Verifiability. Ken Schwartz 19:24, 28 May 2008 (EDT)


 * I think links to their generated portfolios are fine. PiperWarrior 20:18, 28 May 2008 (EDT)


 * I agree absolutely. I wasn't really clear in my statements. I think we have to be a little careful in making generalizations about the nature of Vanguard's plans, because we have no verifiable source for the planners' guidance. We can look at some client-reported plans and make inferences, but we probably shouldn't word any criticisms too strongly. Ken Schwartz 20:31, 28 May 2008 (EDT)
 * I've added an attempt at wording we might use. Ken Schwartz 07:04, 29 May 2008 (EDT)
 * Dan, over at Indexplanners.com has links to Vanguard Planning documents, with his commentary:

link to page Blbarnitz 10:17, 29 May 2008 (EDT) I had temporarily placed some ugly material under Criticisms which doesn't belong in the main article:
 * Financial Plan Redacted Vanguard plan, produced by Vanguard Financial Planning Services (they charge $1000 for this)
 * Vanguard: My Portfolio Report Redacted output from the Vanguard My Portfolio Report. This report is automatically generated by the My Portfolio tool, which is available to Voyager customers. It pulls in financial information from accounts at 10,000+ external institutions, and then analyzes the results (though it's buggy)
 * Vanguard Advisor Portfolio Report This is the report using the tool from Vangaurd's Advisor website. It seems far inferior to the above two reports
 * Vanguard Cost Comparison This is a two-fund comparison report from the Vanguard Advisor website. It seems like we could do a much better job

Anecdotal Observations
Links to lots of plans from the forum. Criticism of cookie-cutter nature, lack of TIPS or dedicated REIT exposure, inclusion of Diversified Equity, etc. Possible wording:

Here are some links to discussions of particular Vanguard-generated plans on the Bogleheads Forum.

bulleted conversation list here

Common complaints include:

bulleted list of potential drawbacks here

These comments are probably superseded by Barry's talk entry directly above. However, I wanted to remove them from the main article without losing them. Ken Schwartz 20:27, 13 June 2008 (EDT)