Roth IRA - Need Help

[manasecret]

I'm glad you brought this back, too.

From my experience with them, I'd highly recommend Vanguard. Their online interface is very helpful with lots of tools and charts and the like -- to me these are mandatory for an investment site and they should be the highest quality. I think Vanguard does very well here.

But, more importantly, my returns: I invested $2300 in cash. The investment is now worth $2975. It's been about a year for most of that investment, so I got about a 13-14% annual return. That's a very good return. Of course, I bought when the market was low, so just about any fund would have done well.

The only regret is that I didn't have enough money to get into more aggressive funds.

I have still only invested in the STAR Fund with Vanguard, which is their beginner fund with the cheapest buy-in ($1000). STAR has a non-aggressive asset mix for my age -- 61% stocks and 39% bonds. I should be at something like 90% stocks and 10% bonds. If I had, I'm sure I would have gotten something like a 20% annual return instead of the 13-14% return I got (but I'm not complaining). But the buy-ins are $3000 or more.

Vanguard has plenty of funds to go around, including more aggressive ones and more defensive ones, and ones for just about any kind of area you want to invest in (tech, international, etc.). If you Google for good funds you'll find some highly recommended ones from Vanguard.

I feel Vanguard is a safe investment firm and have funds with good returns, but I only have the limited experience described here with them so take that for what it's worth.

P.S. I would have invested a lot more since then, but I've decided to focus on paying off debts. Which, having a girlfriend, is really slow... I've also been focusing on getting a 6 month emergency savings account before doing anything else, since I feel my company is on rocky ground. However, as I said before, a good thing about the Roth IRA versus the regular IRA, if I am really desperate, I can always cash out the investment I made ($2300 in my case) with no penalty. (Of course, this assumes that my investment's worth doesn't drop below $2300.) Cashing out kind of ruins the point of the IRA, but it does give me a little peace of mind in case my life turns to shit.