Just opened up an etrade account and funded it with $500. Once the funds hit in a few days I'm going to dump $300 in ZEX.
And today it came true. Looks to be less than the $4-5 range for now(could get into a short bidding war with another company), but it still went down as I thought it would. This has been an awesome year for me in the market.
Yea me 2. Made a nice penny on a few energy small caps I put some money into. Clearing about $6.5K. Debating on whether or not just to cash out or let it ride.
Your mattress is about the only thing I can think of. Seriously though, I don't think there is anything that doesn't have some sort of early withdrawal penalty attached to it.
Roths will let you withdraw the principle without penalty and sometimes more (ex. 10k for first time homebuyers). Cash value life insurance will grow tax-deferred and depending on what kind you have you can have the cash value accessible without penalty (and sometimes without taxes even on gain if you do it right). Now, if what you're looking for is both something that works well in less than five years *and* is tax-deferred without an early withdrawal penalty then you're going to have more problems. But if you just want to be able to pull money out prior to age 59.5 but are ok with some time to let the investment grow, then life insurance will do it for you (given the right policy structure and company of course).
Roths also have a limit, and I already maxed mine out. Cash value life insurance sounds ok, but if I'm deferring my taxes in return for a maintenance fee, it kind of defeats the purpose. Maintenance fees most certainly would eat up any deferment gain.
That's not always the case, though specific factors come into play. In the early years, yes, the longer the policy is accumulating the less that's true. It really comes down to what policy you use, how you structure it, what kind of time horizon you're looking for, and ultimate goal for the money.
Any good reading suggestions on retirement investing? I've had to spend some time building my safety net back up but I'm in a good place now, with a healthy savings account, no debt and I've maxed out my 401k contributions. What's next? IRA? Roth IRA? So many of the articles I've been reading have been either too extreme ("Save 78% of your income for 10 years and you can retire!") or product focused ("Our retirement advice is that you invest in our RetireMAX 3000 product.") - I'm not going to squirrel away every penny for the next 25 years, since I like to travel, but I also don't want to be working when I'm 75.
Is any one of the online stock brokerage firms particularly superior? I have stock vesting next month that would be nice to actually track somewhere, and also am coincidentally sitting on a lot of cash right now, so I was thinking about loading something up a bit to play with. If it truly doesn't make a difference, I have an IRA open with Fidelity already, so my preference would be to stick to fewer companies and open one there. Thoughts?
I've been with a few, but I stuck with E*Trade and like it the best. If you make enough trades you get to keep some of the advanced features you get when you first sign up. Level 2 trading vision is one of those things that is invaluable if you play on doing any sort of regular trading. My 401k and Roth are through Merrill lynch, but I only keep it because its through my workplace. Their system kind of sucks for serious trading.
I want you to take it in the best possible way when I say that there will never be a scenario in my life, where I will seek out or even seriously consider any advice you have to give. But thanks for caring.
I think it really comes back to the commission they take per trade as they all have similar charts and algorithms. Hell, even if they didn't have profiles on the company, you could use Yahoo! and end up saving a lot of money if you're using a stripped down online brokerage. As PC mentioned, level 2 trading is an advantage, but I believe you have to be trading often to make it cost effective.
Cool. I wouldn't be doing any kind of high volume trading. I'll check out what the cost per trade is with fidelity vs. some of the other household names and just roll with one.
Sure dude, I just make in a year what you make in four so I learned [payed a lot of money] to ensure my future. Keep being an internet hardass though.
You flex your dick about your salary & what you paid for financial advice in a forum post, but I'm the "internet hardass"? Awesome. Please rest assured that my comments had nothing to do with your yearly earnings, and everything to do with my having less than zero respect for anything that might dribble out of your word hole. I got plenty of good advice via PM from people that haven't proven themselves totally worthless. And in the interest of keeping this thread topical, that's the last I'll say on that subject.
If your 401k contributions are all pretax, then definitely roth IRA so you're diversifying your tax status. You may even want to consider going through a place like Lending Club, which is a peer to peer lending site. Pros: -Stable returns (around 8% a year) -No crashes, most of your money is probably in the market so this will diversify you a bit Cons: -Inflation sensitive -You miss out on the good market years Beyond that are you in a health plan that qualifies you to have an HSA? If so max that sucker out every year, it's without question the best investment vehicle from a tax stand point.
That's interesting, one of our other health plans lets me have an HSA. Never thought about it as an investment account. I'll look into it - thanks for the tip.