Updated August 10, 2026. Quick answer. A useful annual checkup doesn’t mean re-deciding your entire strategy every year — it means checking four specific things that drift over time even when nothing about your goals has changed: how far your actual allocation has drifted from your target, whether any fund’s cost has crept up, whether you’ve accumulated unintentional overlap, and whether your timeline itself has shifted.
Check allocation drift first
Stocks and bonds don’t grow at the same rate, so a portfolio that started at a target mix (say, 70% stocks / 30% bonds) can drift meaningfully off that target after a strong or weak year for either asset class, without you having done anything. A simple check — current percentage in each asset class versus your original target — tells you whether a rebalance is overdue, not a subjective feeling about “is the market too high right now.”
Re-check costs — not just once, at purchase
Expense ratios can change, funds can be merged into higher-cost share classes, and new lower-cost alternatives in the same category can appear after you bought. A once-a-year check of each holding’s current expense ratio against its category average catches quiet cost creep that a one-time purchase decision wouldn’t have flagged.
Re-run the overlap check
New purchases (a new fund added to a 401(k), a stock bought outside your main brokerage account) can create overlap with existing holdings that wasn’t there when you first built the portfolio. An annual re-check of top holdings across all accounts — not just within one account — is the only way to catch overlap that accumulated across accounts you don’t view side by side day to day.
The check most people skip: has your own timeline moved?
A target retirement date, a health change, or a new dependent can change how much risk makes sense in your portfolio — independent of anything the market did. Our own portfolio second-opinion checklist and advisor proposal scorecard are built for exactly this kind of periodic recheck, whether you’re doing it yourself or comparing what an advisor is proposing against it.
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