Our two car payments finish this summer, leaving me with about $1k/month in free cash flow. I'm thinking about putting this into a set of ETFs along these lines:

33% Emerging Markets
33% International (i.e. NON-USA)
33% Small- and Mid-cap USA stocks.

Leaving out the S&P-500/large cap stocks is intentional, as I'm already very heavily invested there in my and my wife's 401k plans. The international funds offered by our 401k plans have extremely high expense ratios (over 1.5%) and I can't justify paying that kind of expense when I can do it for 1/5th of that somewhere else.

I'm considering the new Vanguard ETFs, specifically VWO, VEU, VXF. These are very new issues, should there be any concerns there? The Vanguard funds appear to have very reasonable expense ratios: VWO: 0.08% VEU: 0.25% VXF 0.30%

Is there any reason to believe that funds from a different company would be significantly better? (I'm by no means wedded to Vanguard, they just seemed to have the stuff I was most interested in at very low expense ratios)

My main question is whether I'm better off buying the funds themselves, or purchasing through ETFs. Given my $1k/month budget, I'm planning on just buying a block of each ETF per month, at $10/trade for the commission. Is a net 1% fee structure reasonable here?

Any other suggestions that folks have would be welcome.