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Target-date mutual funds are a growing part of 401(k) retirement plans, leading savers to wonder if they are worth a look.

Here’s the quick and dirty take: They’re worth more than a look. The average Jane and Joe, who know little about investing, would probably do well to dump their entire 401(k) fortune into the target date option.

Chances are they will do better than if they pick among the other funds in the plan.

Of course, the quick and dirty leaves out a lot of nuance. Some investors — mainly the well-heeled and investment-savvy — might not want to be all-in on target date funds. We’ll get to those lucky duckies later on.

Another exception: A few retirement plans still offer substandard target funds.

Target-date funds are the “autopilot” option. The target is your retirement date. When investors are young, the funds are heavy in stocks, taking on heavy volatility. They become more conservative as retirement approaches, switching more into bonds and cash. A professional manager does the adjusting.

The U.S. Department of Labor set the target-date trend in motion in 2006. Worried that too many workers were making poor investment choices, the government urged plans to adopt target-date plans. They became the legally permitted default option in 401(k) plans.

There’s evidence that Uncle Sam did savers a favor. Researchers from the University of Oregon and Boston University studied the results for employees in Oregon university system’s retirement plan, which is like a 401(k), over a decade ending in 2009.

Some participants picked funds themselves. Others paid an adviser to help with the picking. The researchers compared the results with target-date fund investments.

The do-it-yourselfers actually did better than those who paid for advice. But the target-date funds did better than both.

“From a theoretical investment perspective, you’re probably best off just putting your investments in the target-date fund,” says Josh Charlson, senior fund analyst at Morningstar, the mutual fund analysis firm.

This makes sense. Amateurs tend to make two errors in their 401(k) choices. They are often too conservative — hoarding too much cash in the “stable value” options when they’re young. They also panic too easily, selling out of stocks when the market takes a big hit. That’s often the best time to buy.

Surrendering such decisions to the target-date fund manager removes the temptation to goof. “People tend to do more poorly making investment decisions on their own,” says Charlson.

That said, they may still have reason to freak out now and then. This is not no-risk investing. The 2008 financial panic sent practically all investments except Treasury bonds into a tailspin. Funds with target dates of 2011 to 2015 took a 27 percent hit, according to Morningstar. That shocked investors a few years from retirement.

Now for the nuance. Before dumping it all in a target-date fund, consider:

• Just how the fund allocates money and what it charges for that service.
• How it fits in with your other savings.

There’s quite a difference between funds in terms of riskiness. Take a comparison done by Morningstar of three prominent target date 2015 funds for customers nearing retirement.

Fidelity Freedom was 46 percent stocks, which are riskier than bonds. The Vanguard fund was 54 percent in stocks and T. Rowe Price Retirement was 61. The industry average is 45 to 50 percent stocks at retirement.

Some funds will dip a toe into commodities, real estate and other alternative investments. Others won’t.

Personally, I wouldn’t want 61 percent of my money in stocks on retirement day. I want to relax, not worry about the stock market.

“You have to know your own risk tolerance, your own expectations and what you think is reasonable,” says Brooks Herman of Brightscope, a firm that analyzes 401(k) plans. If your target date fund is too heavy on stocks, you might want to add a little of your plan’s bond fund.

Fortunately, the investment mix varies less for young people — all the funds are heavy in stocks, as they should be.

Target-date funds are almost all funds of funds. That is, the target fund’s manager places the money in other mutual funds. He adjusts the balance now and then as markets rise and fall and the target date draws closer.

But some funds use better stock-and-bond pickers than others. For instance, Morningstar is down on the AllianceBernstein target-date funds. Bad investment-picking, says Charlson.

The bad eggs tend to get booted from retirement plans over time. After all, the big boss is in your 401(k) plan, too, and he wants good funds.

Morningstar has a star-rating system for funds. You can check them at morningstar.com. You can usually check a fund’s track record and its investment allocation through the 401(k) plan’s website.

Brightscope.com also publishes its quality rating on hundreds of company 401(k) plans.

Fees, known as the expense ratio in fund-speak, are another issue. Some run over 1 percent, leading some investors to wonder if they couldn’t construct a similar asset mix using the cheaper index funds in the 401(k) plan.

The good news is that fees are coming down. They averaged 0.58 percent last year, against 0.67 percent the year before, according to the Investment Company Institute.

In part, that’s due to competition from companies such as Vanguard, which charges just 0.16 to 0.18 percent for its target-date funds using an index approach.

Now for the lucky duckies with big pots of money outside their retirement plans. If you’re very aggressive or very conservative in your outside investments, a target-date fund alone might not be your best option. You might want to add another fund to get the balance right.

But for the rest of us, the target-date fund can take some of the headaches, poor decisions and fear out of investing.

Jim Gallagher is a reporter at the Post-Dispatch