If you’re planning to retire in almost 40 years, why would you focus on the G Fund or life cycle funds? With that much time to retirement, my understanding is its best to stick with the C/S/I funds, as they follow different parts of the market, and although they are performing poorly now, you can buy them up cheaply. As their performance improves over the next 40 years, the value will increase significantly.

With the C/S/I funds, you’re essentially tracking the S&P 500, small/mid sized companies, and international markets. It allows you diversification if one section of the market is performing better or worse than others. The G/F are lower risk and better as you get closer to retirement, but with 40 years before you need that money, you don’t need them as much. Typically high risk/high reward is better at the beginning of your investing, and then transitioning to a conservative low risk option before retirement, as you’ve got less time to recover from losses.

As for C/S/I over life cycle, in the former you get to pick how you transition to decreased risk. If you decide you want to get out right at 20 and never work again, or stay beyond 2060, you can make those changes on your own. Otherwise the life cycle will automatically decrease risk as you get closer to 2060. Personally I like having more control over it. Also, the C/S often outperform the life cycle funds. Here are the fund performances since their inception. With the exception of this year, C/S have historically done better than the life cycle funds, even against those that were created back in the early 2000s. This year is an abnormality, but with 40 years until retirement and good historical data supporting C/S, it seems the best plan is to take some risk now to put more into C/S to gain more as they improve.

In terms of percentages, Dave Ramsey argues placing 80/10/10% or 60/20/20% into C/S/I.

TLDR: I’d go with neither the G fund or Lifecycle given how far out you are from retirement