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I guess I'll start looking at the other calculators. I've put most all my roth ira money in an index fund of the s&p 500 (and some in the commodities market, especially oil and silver. the 401k money is in the 2060 fund which i suspect is mostly stocks. Do you recommend I put it in real company stocks ?
S&P500 is fine. I think it has gotten a bit overhyped, but if you just want something to own for the long term and not think about it, you could do worse.
How are you investing in oil? ETF's such as "OIL" and "USO" are not good long term holdings. They use futures contracts to try and follow the price of oil, which is okay for short-term trades but absolutely not the right approach for the long run. If you want to own metals I'd just buy the real thing and stick it in a safe deposit box.
Most people will pooh pooh owning individual stocks. It's not for everyone, and probably not for most people. If you want to try it, do it in a separate account from your mutual fund holdings. I'd put something like 10%-20% of your savings in there... enough to make a difference if you do well, but not so much you risk your retirement if you lose it.
S&P500 is fine. I think it has gotten a bit overhyped, but if you just want something to own for the long term and not think about it, you could do worse.
How are you investing in oil? ETF's such as "OIL" and "USO" are not good long term holdings. They use futures contracts to try and follow the price of oil, which is okay for short-term trades but absolutely not the right approach for the long run. If you want to own metals I'd just buy the real thing and stick it in a safe deposit box.
Most people will pooh pooh owning individual stocks. It's not for everyone, and probably not for most people. If you want to try it, do it in a separate account from your mutual fund holdings. I'd put something like 10%-20% of your savings in there... enough to make a difference if you do well, but not so much you risk your retirement if you lose it.
My comment is the same, though. Take a look at the price of crude oil versus these exchange traded proxies for oil. WTI is about the same price today as it was in early 2009. So one might expect that "OIL" should trade at about the same level as it did back then. Not true. It's about 1/3 the price.
what is that? I've tried googling and the only thing that came up was some digital media management tool.
It's a joke, playing off of a line from Burton Malkiel's “A Random Walk Down Wall Street”:
“A BLINDFOLDED monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages, could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by experts."
Check your 401K plan documents (ask HR for a copy if they don't already have one online) and read it to see what your company's plan allows. Many companies will allow you to keep contributing to your 401K even past the $18.5K limit. Those contributions won't be tax deferred, as they would be contributions to the 401K made after tax, but the IRS yearly limit on all contributions to a 401K is $53K/year right now. That's a nice bonus for high savers.
And, any $$ you do contribute to your 401K beyond the initial 18.5K limit, ("after-tax" 401K contributions + gains on those contributions) can be converted into a Rollover Roth IRA upon leaving the company, and at that point (after paying tax on the gains of those monies) those "after-tax" monies will become a Roth IRA. That means all future earnings from that point forward will be tax free upon withdrawal when you're age 59.5 or above.
So think of those extra 401K contributions as a "deferred Roth."
IF you can contribute extra into your 401K, you absolutely can amass enough $$$ for a very nice retirement. And be willing to take risk and select an allocation of at least 75% equities and never panic.
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