Five.
Home — The Five Fund Frame

Every dollar
has a job.
Your portfolio
needs five funds.

Cash. Income. Growth. International. One bet you believe in.
Pick one ETF for each job. That's the portfolio.

Build your Frame — free How it works
Michael Ashley By Michael Ashley — banking and asset management, 20+ years
Richiest — Every dollar has a job. Your portfolio needs five funds.
The Five Fund Frame

Five jobs. Five funds. One complete portfolio.

Each slot does one thing. Pick the best fund for that job and leave it alone. The Frame handles the rest.

Slot 01
Park
Money you might need tomorrow.
Default: SGOV
Slot 02
Earn
Money that pays you while you wait.
Default: SCHD
Slot 03
Build
Money that builds wealth for future-you.
Default: VOO
Slot 04
Roam
Money that doesn't bet everything on one country.
Default: VXUS
Slot 05
Dare
Money you can afford to lose on something you believe in.
Default: Your pick
One fund per job. That's the portfolio.
The Bogleheads portfolio tells you to hold stocks, bonds, and international.
Richiest agrees — and adds two things the orthodoxy ignores: a proper cash position, and a legitimized slot for the bet you were going to make anyway.
What the Bogleheads get right

Diversified index investing beats most active management over time. Low costs matter enormously. The Frame is built on these foundations.

What the Frame adds

A dedicated Park slot because "invest everything" is bad advice when rent is due. A Dare slot because pretending investors won't take high-conviction bets doesn't stop them — it just means they do it without a framework.

The Frame respects the Bogleheads core — and adds what it leaves out.
How it works

Three steps. Then stop touching it.

1

Pick your life stage

The Frame allocates differently depending on where you are. In your 20s, Build gets 55% — you have time on your side. In your 60s, Earn gets 40% — your portfolio should be paying you. The Build Your Frame tool handles the math.

Outcome: your target allocation.
2

Pick one fund per slot

Each slot has a Pareto pick — the fund that wins its job for most investors. SGOV, SCHD, VOO, VXUS. Dare is yours to choose. Read the analysis if you want reasoning. Or just use the defaults.

Outcome: five funds, one portfolio.
3

Rebalance once a year

Set recurring investments proportional to your targets. Check once a year for drift greater than 5–10 percentage points. Rebalance if needed. That's the whole system.

Outcome: done. Leave it alone.
Set it up in minutes. Check once a year. That's the entire system.
Suggested allocations

The numbers shift as life does.

Life stage Park Earn Build Roam Dare
20s 5% 10% 55% 20% 10%
30s 10% 15% 45% 20% 10%
40s 10% 25% 35% 20% 10%
50s 15% 30% 30% 20% 5%
60s+ 20% 40% 20% 15% 5%

Starting points, not personalized advice. Adjust to your income, timeline, and risk tolerance.

The logic behind the shift

Early on, Build dominates because compounding needs time. A 25-year-old investing $500 a month in VOO for 35 years has decades of market returns working for them.

As retirement approaches, sequence-of-returns risk becomes real — a bad market in the first three years of retirement can permanently impair an all-equity portfolio. Earn's growing income reduces the need to sell Build at unfavorable prices. Park ensures there's always dry powder.

The Dare slot never exceeds 10% at any life stage. It's the boundary between a high-conviction bet and a portfolio-altering gamble.

Find your allocation →
Build is always the engine. Everything else supports it.
How the Frame compares

Good portfolios are not mysterious. The problem is that most alternatives hide the tradeoffs.

Three other approaches. One honest comparison.

The Bogleheads 3-Fund

Stocks, bonds, international. Simple and mostly right.

The three-fund portfolio is the gold standard for a reason. Low cost, diversified, easy to maintain. The Frame agrees with the core insight and diverges on two points: T-bills are safer than bonds and currently yield more, and the absence of a structured high-risk slot.

Robo-advisors

Answer 15 questions. Get a portfolio you don't understand.

Robo-advisors automate good behavior — regular investing, rebalancing, tax-loss harvesting. The downside: they build portfolios opaque enough that most investors don't understand what they own or why. The Frame is transparent by design. Five funds, five jobs, explainable to anyone.

Stock picking

Most people underperform the index they're trying to beat.

Stock picking is not wrong — it's just hard. The research on individual stock selection versus index funds is clear: most active strategies underperform their benchmarks over 10+ years, net of costs and taxes. The Frame gives you index exposure plus a legitimate outlet for conviction plays in the Dare slot.

Every alternative has merit. The Frame makes the tradeoffs visible instead of hidden.

Start with the most common questions first, then drill into the category sections below.

Start here

The four tools most people open first.

Build

Build Your Frame

Set the five slots, tune the percentages, and see whether your portfolio actually matches your life stage.

Open the frame builder →
Earn

Dividend Calculator

Turn yield into actual cash flow without pretending every dividend line tells the whole story.

Estimate dividend income →
Park

Retirement Income Calculator

Estimate how much income a portfolio can throw off in retirement without hand-waving the numbers.

Estimate retirement income →
Dare

Dare Risk Calculator

Sanity-check the volatile bucket before you size it. If the drawdown would wreck your week, it is too big.

Check Dare risk →
View all 10 tools →

Quick peek — what your age says about Build

At age 30, the Frame suggests 45% Build. The engine carries most of the weight — your job is to let it compound.

Get your allocation. Then leave it alone.

Subscribe for the Five Fund Frame, then automate your five slots on any major broker.

No special platform required. No manual trades or rebalancing math needed.