Ok who's the financial whiz here?

[SamGuss]

Have to rollover my old 401K into an IRA. I like to be in "control" of my retirement fund and where I invest it - so far over the last few years I have been pretty good at it even.

However, I don't know squat about IRA's. Been looking at rolling it over to Fidelity, but figured I would summon the help of my cigar brethen who might have some good advice.

Ideally this is kinda what I would like:

- be able to turn it over from an IRA into a Roth IRA
- have a very low fee, or free trade fees when I switch funds/stocks
- have a min. opening balance of less than 1K (rolling over less than 1K obviously)
- can automatically (or with as less hassle as possible) rollover my 401K into the IRA account without having to front much if any money personally

If you have some advice, I am all ears.

TIA!

Sam

 

[Lumberg]

Master's in Finance here and spendtrift here.

I like the self-guided IRAs that you can get from discount brokers (like Ameritrade). Basically works just like a brokerage account only without margin (can't buy on credit or sell short).

Use them to buy ETF or Exchange Traded Funds. You're probably heard about Spiders, Cubes, and Diamonds. Buy them. They have MUCH lower expense ratios than any open ended fund, even taking into account brokerage commisions. Plus you have the control of logging in and selling with one click. Heck you can even do a stop limit order on em!

Two words of advice: BUY and HOLD.

Don't use your IRA to day trade or even week trade or month trade. You were thinking about getting a mutual fund. The best kind to get is the kind run by a strict computer program (the index funds, the more stocks in it the better (thus SPDR>QQQ>DIA))

That's my quick and dirty. PM or further thread discussion welcomed.

 

[gibu]

I don't have the credentials lumberg has, but I like TIAA-Cref. Its a company originally set up to handle teachers pensions I believe but it's open to anyone. I like it and got involved because of there low cost automatic contribution programs. They have mostly indexed type stuff and almost no fees. There customer service is a little on the weak side, but then again, there not charging you hardly anything either. You can get in on the mutal fund for only $25 a month and an IRA or Roth IRA for only $50 per month.

I don't know if they would have the type of control your looking for, but I like them as a buy and forget it, very low cost type thing. You can check out there site and see if they have anything that appeals to you.

I have been in for a while so sorry if things have changed any since I last knew.

 

[MrJerry]

I agree with Lumberg, self-guided IRAs are the way to go. You'r ein control and remain somewhat liquid. We used some of our stock to buy our house...the bank is holding them and gave us 80% on the dollar as a loan value. We did not sell (eventhough we can do so) and we still have our "drip" plan intact.

We've never sold anything, we only buy. Dollar cost averaging over the long term is a wonder way to invest!