3,4 or 5 year journey to financial freedom

I am mulling over whether I should include inheritance as one of the factors in my retirement plans too. My father, who is in his late 80s, plans to split his estate between me and a sibling. But I'm reluctant to include it in my reckonings because I'm not sure how much he has to leave in total and it seems rude to ask. Also, things can change or go wrong. I feel I should probably stick to factors I have some control over now.

Frugal90, should add: will read about your journey towards retirement with great interest!

Your investment trusts look like you've been reading the www.fool.co.uk Investment trust board where a poster "Luniversal" has been tracking various portfolios for decades. These seem gewared to capital preservation so although there may be some equities in there I think that counts as some diversification. These will secure/preserve your capital in extreme times, but possibly at a cost of lower returns in normal times

You have no property bonds or commodities. Now you are exposed to UK property through your house so that's not too bad, bonds are generally regarded as extremely expensive at the moment (yet that view has been true for years and they have been returning stonkingly well as the 30 year yield curve gets flatter and flatter) commodities I think at the moment are likely to be correlated with equity. So I don't think that omission is serious - but you might want to consider other asset classes

For example Some would recommend you hedge your portfolio with some precious metal exposure (if inflation kicks in or there is another crisis that could be good. At some point you have to make sure your portfolio is robust against shocks even if after a year in which no shocks has happened you might think what am I doing.

In terms of your funds, you look like you will be paying some high fees and I don't understand why you have so many especially as they are all of a single type (ie Opps) - surely a general purpose euro fund, a single EM fund would be better - or if you must have multiple then one could be special situations, one could be large cap, and one could be smaller cap

you should look at the vanguard thread (http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=4392271 where people discuss strategies around their life strategy funds (ie very large generalist funds have eg 60% equities, 80% equities. These funds are REALLY cheap and seems to do OK. The thread also discusses various top up strategies to cover areas (eg EM) that the Vanguard fund doesn't. You should look into Vanguard whole range of low cost funds as you may be able to mirror your risk/return spread at a lower cost

cool - I also like the Lindsell train IT - has done very well for me although at £460 a share dealing costs make your eyes water, but if you are going to hold forever then that's not too bad

whereas yours seem very unweighted to the usa - again which is a common position as they have had a fair run at it - but avoiding a geography is quite an active decision in any case particularly where that is the usa.

my favorite saying is what works most years doesn't work every year so I would say that was a bit of a gap (although clearly most FTSE100 companies are quite exposed to us economy)