Every August the same thing happens. People open their brokerage statements, notice their allocation has drifted, and start Googling what to buy. 247 Wall St. published a piece this week on Vanguard ETFs that belong in most portfolios, and it got me thinking about the shortlist I'd write myself, so that's what you're getting here. Consider it my answer to their August rebalancing prompt, with my own picks.

The four I'd start with are the usual suspects, and I mean that as a compliment: the Total Stock Market ETF (VTI), the Total International Stock ETF (VXUS), the Total Bond Market ETF (BND), and the S&P 500 ETF (VOO). Nothing exotic. That's the whole point. Before you buy any of them, do what I always tell people to do and look up the current expense ratio on Vanguard's own site, because those numbers change and my memory shouldn't be your data source.

But let me do the math on fees generally, because I always do the math. Say you invest $500 a month over 25 years and earn 8 percent annually before costs. You end up with roughly $475,000. Now suppose an actively managed fund charges 1 percent a year, which drops your net return to 7 percent. You end up closer to $406,000. Same market, same effort, about $69,000 gone to fees. The market didn't take it. The fund company did, quietly, a little every day. Fees are the one part of investing you fully control, and most people never look at them.

I've written before about why a total market fund like VTI remains the best first investment most people can make. It spreads you across essentially the entire U.S. stock market for a few dollars a year in costs. VXUS covers the international side, and I've been tracking the chatter about capital rotating out of U.S. stocks for weeks now. Whether that rotation is real or a summer story, I can't tell you, and neither can anyone else with any confidence. But that's the point of owning both. You don't have to guess.

BND is the least loved of the four, which is exactly why it belongs. Bonds had a miserable stretch a few years back and a lot of investors swore them off forever. I lived through the early '80s, when bond yields were double digits, and through 2022, when they got crushed alongside stocks. The lesson isn't that bonds are bad. It's that bonds do a different job. They're the part of your portfolio you don't have to think about at 2 a.m.

And VOO, the S&P 500 fund, is fine if you prefer it to VTI. There's heavy overlap between the two, so owning both is a bit like buying a pizza and a slightly larger pizza. Pick one and move on.

The honest caveat is that no list of four funds fits every portfolio. A 28-year-old saving for retirement has different needs than a 63-year-old, which is closer to my situation, planning withdrawals instead of contributions. The funds are the ingredients. Your age and your stomach for downturns decide the proportions. My only rule is that whatever you pick, you keep picking it. Patience and consistency beat cleverness in this business, and I've got forty years of scars to prove it.

As always, I'm sharing perspective, not professional financial advice. Talk to a fee-only advisor before making big changes.