They tend to be conservative in their asset allocation but you are taking care of that by going with an extended date.

In a taxable account the constant rebalancing may generate additional capital gains taxes.

Most of them don't have a fixed percent of each asset class that try to keep constant like 80% stocks and 20% bonds, but may change the asset allocation based on their managements best guess of which way the markets are headed. For example it might have an 80/20 mix today and six months from now they may have chosen to change it to 75/25 mix. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but you should check it occasionally so that you know what you have.

Part of what you are buying is bond funds. Bond funds behave very differently than individual bonds. For example if the bond fund has an average interest rate of 5% and an average term of 10 years, if interest rates go up to 6%, then you will loose a pretty good chunk of money. If instead you had a 10 year bond at 5% it doesn't matter how interest rates change as long as you hold it for the full ten years. (This is a bit overly simplistic) With interest rates in the low single digits and talk of inflation, I don't feel too warm and fuzzy about bonds and even less so about bond funds so I would tend to focus shorter term bonds, but with a target retirement account you don't have any control of the average duration of the bonds you are getting.


Greg