Your Digital Advisor personalized glide path can put you on the right path to retirement

Read time: 4 to 6 minutes

Whether your retirement is close by or far away, the path for getting there on your timeline isn’t always clear. That’s why advice services like Vanguard Digital Advisor® were created—to take the guesswork out of choosing the best route for reaching your retirement destination. Read on to learn more about how Digital Advisor can create your personalized investing path and why completing your investor profile matters for your retirement success.

Choosing the right route to retirement

Your road to retirement involves investing in a mix of stocks and bonds that changes over time. As you get closer to retirement, experts generally recommend reducing investment risk by decreasing the amount of stocks you hold. Why? Because you’ll have less time to recover from losses if the market dips close to your retirement—when you’ll need the money.

In retirement planning, the route to retirement is called a “glide path.” Your glide path matters because your investment mix is responsible for over 90% of your portfolio’s returns.1 So getting—and staying—on the right path is key to arriving at your retirement destination on time. Just like getting directions from a GPS puts and keeps you on the right road toward your driving destination.

The glide path concept isn’t new. In fact, target-date investments (TDI)—one of the most common retirement plan investments—have been using glide paths for years. These investments hold a broad mix of mutual funds that contain a diverse mix of stocks and bonds. TDIs use a set date in the future—the “target date”—as the basis for their glide path. The further away the TDI is from the target date, the more stocks it will hold, seeking the high growth potential stocks can provide. As the target date approaches, the TDI gradually decreases its stock holdings and increases its bond holdings. Bonds usually have a lower risk of loss, but they also have lower potential gains.

Sample Digital Advisor personalized glide path graph showing how an investment mix changes over time to be more conservative as the investor nears retirement.
Sample glide path showing the changing mix of investments over time.

You’re unique—your glide path should be too

Like TDIs, Digital Advisor uses a glide path to build a broad mix of stock and bonds in your retirement account that changes over time. Unlike TDIs, which use an approximate 5-year “target date” range, Digital Advisor chooses a personalized glide path (PGP) just for you, based on the unique info you provide in your investor profile.

What Digital Advisor needs to build your personalized glide path

Digital Advisor automates the process of choosing the best investment mix for you. Once you provide Digital Advisor with the info it needs, it uses that info and your investing preferences, along with details provided by your employer, to choose the best PGP for you from over 1,000 options.2

So if you tell Digital Advisor that you’re comfortable with financial risk and want your investments to grow for as long as possible, Digital Advisor will select a PGP for you that takes longer to become more conservative. That gives your money more time to take advantage of potential market growth. On the other hand, if you indicate that you’re less comfortable with financial risk, Digital Advisor will select a PGP that becomes more conservative sooner, to help preserve the money you’ve already saved. So whatever your situation, Digital Advisor has a glide path for you!

The info you provide to Digital Advisor

What this info tells Digital Advisor

Your retirement age

How much time you have for saving and investing before you'll need your money in retirement

Your time in retirement

How long you'll need your money in retirement

Your tax filing status

Whether you'll need retirement money for one person or two

Your feelings about financial risk and loss

How comfortable you are with investment risk. Digital Advisor uses this info to reccomend the right mix of stocks and bonds for you

Other info Digital Advisor uses        

What this info tells Digital Advisor    

Your current age

How much time you have for saving and investing before you reach your retirement age

Your retirement income

How much of your current employment will be replaced by Social Security benefits and pension income in retirement. Digital Advisor uses this info to figure out how much replacement income you'll need from your retirement age

Your savings rate

How much employment income you're saving for retirement, so Digital Advisor can tell if you're on track to reach your retirement goal 

The information that Digital Advisor uses to build a PGP.

Your glide path really does matter

Vanguard research shows that your PGP offers you greater “utility” compared with a generic investing strategy.2 That’s a fancy way of saying you’ll have greater emotional and financial satisfaction if you use the investing strategy your PGP offers. That matters because, if you’re satisfied with your investing strategy, you’ll be less likely to change it when the markets wobble.
Line graph chart comparing default and personalized glide paths in Digital Advisor. The chart displays recommended equity percentage on the vertical axis and age on the horizontal axis. The default glide path line starts at 100% equities at age 30 and declines steeply to around 60% equities around age 55. The default glide path line then remains at around 60% equities until age 100. The personalized glide path line starts at 90% equities at age 30 and gradually declines to around 30% equities by age 80. The personalized glide path line then remains at around 30% equities until age 100.
Sample glide paths showing how completing your investor profile results in a more personalized investment mix.

And completing your investor profile matters, too, because it helps Digital Advisor build the right glide path for you—and not an “unpersonalized” one that’s based on settings chosen by your employer. An unpersonalized glide path won’t reflect your unique financial situation or your feelings about financial risk and loss.

Remember, just as a GPS will only get you to the right destination if you enter the right address, your Digital Advisor glide path will only get you to your retirement destination if you complete your investor profile. So don’t wait. Get more value from Digital Advisor and set yourself up for retirement success. Complete your investor profile today to get the PGP that’s right for you!

Complete my Profile

The legal details

Whenever you invest, there’s a chance you could lose the money.

1 Stephen M. Weber et al. The Value of Personalized Advice. Vanguard, August 2022.

2 Brian D. Rivera, The Value of Personalized Glide Paths for Plan Participants . Vanguard, 2024.

Target-date investments are subject to the risks of their underlying funds. The year in the investment name refers to the approximate year (the target date) when an investor would retire and leave the workforce. The investment will gradually shift its emphasis from more aggressive investments to more conservative ones based on its target date. A target-date investment is not guaranteed at any time, including on or after the target date.

Vanguard Digital Advisor's services are provided solely by Vanguard Advisers, Inc. (VAI), a registered investment advisor. Please review the Vanguard Digital Advisor brochure for important details about this service. Vanguard Digital Advisor's financial planning tools provide projections and goal forecasts, which are hypothetical in nature, do not reflect actual investment results, and are not guarantees of future results. VAI is a subsidiary of The Vanguard Group, Inc. (VGI) and an affiliate of Vanguard Marketing Corporation (VMC). Neither VAI nor its affiliates guarantee profits or protection from losses.