keoki23,

I don't think anybody reads the "Retirement" board. You'd probably get a better range of advice from one of the following boards:

Retirement Investing
Portfolio Management
Mutual Funds

A few specific answers:
A "balanced fund" is one that tries to keep a set balance between stocks and "Safe" investments like bonds. To learn what the ratio is, you have to read the fund literature. Say the ratio is 50-50. Then owning $1000 of the fund means you should think of it as $500 of stocks and $500 of bonds.

It probably is better to narrow down the funds, since:
1. It's simpler
2. You can stick to lower-fee (expense ratio) funds; in general there is no correlation between higher fees and better performance.

Unfortunately none of your U.S. Equities funds are low-fee. It's particularly galling that they are charging you over 1% annually to invest in the Vanguard Index 500, because the real fee on that is 0.15%!!! *DO NOT BLINDLY INVEST EVERYTHING IN THE Vanguard FUND!*

Ten-year returns are of little to no value for predicting how an investment will do in the future.