This month (July 2016) ends the changes I have been making to my mutual fund family. This month, I am welcoming two new members to the family. Hearty welcome to VWELX (Vanguard Wellington Fund) and VWITX (Vanguard Intermediate Term Tax-exempt fund). The obvious next question is why 🙂

In October of 2014, I implemented my Passive Income Streams strategy. I wrote about it here. One of the six design principles was: For each risk bucket, have a minimum of two investment vehicles. I like this principle for two reasons:

• Investment philosophy diversification
• Investment manager diversification.

My thesis is that both of the above together will provide better risk diversification. Using this thesis, I build the following set of Passive Income streams (as of 10/18/2014).

Table 1: Investment Vehicles Update 10/18/2014

Risk Bucket Name	Investment 1	Investment 2	Investment 3
Risk 1 (Cash)	Smarty Pig (online)	Credit Union	N/A
Risk 2 (Bonds)	VCAIX (CA munis)	N/A	N/A
Risk 3 (Balanced Funds)	VTMFX (50% stocks and 50% National MUNIs)	N/A	N/A
Risk 4 (Dividend Investing)	VDIGX (div growth)	VHDYX (Curr div)	N/A
Risk 5 (Capital Growth)	VTCLX (large+mid cap)	VTMSX (small cap)	N/A
Risk 5 (International Funds)	VTMGX (large blend)	N/A	N/A

Over the last couple months, the stock market has been on a tear. I cannot come up with any logical reason to explain why…it seems that no bad news can touch this market….it seems to go up and up and up. For day traders, this is heaven….but for normal folks like me, this seems suicidal…there is no reasonable value to any asset in my mutual fund family. Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA) is supposed to help me deal with this, but I can’t seem to pour money into vehicles which rise up like crazy. So, I have taken a few steps over the last couple months to do the following:

• Bail out to re-enter at a later date
  • Sold VTCLX and VTMSX
  • Moved some of it to VWITX (National Munis) and some to cash
  • Cash helped me capture valuable stocks big time during the Brexit market dip.
• Sell a portion of funds that had appreciated to capture gains
  • Sold portions of VTMFX, VDIGX and VHDYX
  • Captured gains accumulated over the last two years
• Move some of the captured gains into to more solid ground
  • More on this below…..
• Move the remaining captured gains into cash (Money market funds)
  • Basically fresh powder for the inevitable market downturn….

To redeploy the captured gains, I needed to find new vehicles that will produce passive income for me. I like all the categories I have listed in my original design in Table 1…so no new categories were needed. But some of the mutual funds did not have any competition 🙂 So, I decided to add some competition in two categories:

• Bonds
• Balanced Funds
• Dividend Investing

The changes are listed in Green Color in Table 2 below.

Table 2: Investment Vehicles Update 07/30/2016

Risk Bucket Name	Investment 1	Investment 2	Investment 3
Risk 1 (Cash)	Smarty Pig (online)	Credit Union	N/A
Risk 2 (Bonds)	VCAIX (CA munis)	VWITX (National Munis)	N/A
Risk 3 (Balanced Funds)	VTMFX (50% stocks/50% National MUNIs)	VWELX (60-70% stocks/30-40% bonds)	N/A
Risk 4 (Dividend Investing)	VDIGX (div growth)	VHDYX (Curr div)	VDAIX (div appreciation)
Risk 5 (Capital Growth)	N/A	N/A	N/A
Risk 5 (International Funds)	VTMGX (large blend)	N/A	N/A

Why did I choose those specific funds?

• VWITX
  • In the Bonds category, I had VCAIX (CA Muni bonds). Since this was CA specific only, I bought into VWITX (National Muni bonds). Now mu MUNI bonds are spread across many states in the country. The advantage is that National Munis add better risk diversification. The disadvantage is that I lose the state tax exclusion that VCAIX would have given me.
• VWELX
  • In the Balance funds category, I already had VTMFX…a fund split into 50% stocks (cap appreciation, low dividends) and 50% National Munis. I wanted to add a bit more aggressiveness into the balanced fund category and I chose VWELX, a fund with modest current income and long term growth. The fund invests across a broad section of the market and is known for stable returns….under performance in  bull markets and lower loss in bar markets but stable returns.
  • The disadvantage is that the turnover is 35% i.e. a bit tax unfriendly but short term capital gains are pretty low. So, I think it is worth it….lets see if my bet pays off in the long run.
• VDAIX
  • In the dividend funds category, I already had two funds which I am very happy about. VDIGX is turned for future dividend growth (low current income) and VHDYX is tuned for high current income (low future dividend growth).
  • VDAIX on the other hand is a mix of both: companies that have consistently raised dividends for the last 10 years (good current income) and also the same companies have promise to continue growing the dividend stream in future.
  • One can ask….VDIGX is managed by Donald Kilbride, a super star manager who has consistently beaten VDAIX for the past few years. So, why not invest all the money in VDIGX if you do not need current income? Risk diversification and lower turnover.  Donald Kilbride is one person and VDAIX is an index…no more explaining needed 🙂
• Money Market Fund
  • I want to start accumulating some cash to jump into the market when the markets go down “deep”. I have noticed that when DOW goes 100 pts in the morning, it is back up 200 points by end of market. Looks like a lot of people are investing on a 100 pt dip.
  • My new standard will be to accumulate cash until DOW dips 300 pts. My assumption is that the market will not be able to come back from a 300 pt loss in one day i.e. I can really get some value for money. Lets see how this goes.

Thatz it for now. Join me in welcoming the new members to my mutual fund family!!