Financial Check-up / What are we screwing up?

[rjm1cc]

You are doing a lot better than you give yourself credit for and better than most people.

Your planner should have answered the question on the emergency fund. I would go with either bank. Set up electronic transfer to and from your regular checking account. Plan on it talking a few days to move money.

Look at Vanguard and the investment help they offer.

I think you want to lean toward ETF's funds for now. Reason they trade like stocks so you can set buy and sell points. But you are going for the long term and not buying and selling often.

Go to Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab, etc and read the material on investing.

The ladder. 401k to the match. If you have good investment choices and low cost investments putting money into the 401 as opposed to an IRA is good. Note if the 401k plan is large enough they can get lower costs investments than you can on your own. You might be limited to mutual funds and this is ok.

You probably want to have some ROTH investments. If you can do this in your 401k consider doing it. Outside of your 401k you can always take out your contribution (I think you have to wait 5 years) (not earnings) without penalty thus it can help you in a cash emergency (not replacing your emergency fund). After you do your studying and a better idea of what to do take all of the suggestions you are getting and see what your adviser thinks. Of course he maybe defensive since he did not make the recommendation.

Your return is low so you should be able to do better. I would stay away from bond mutual funds as interest rates will be increasing. Your adviser should tell you what investment bench marks to measure him against and by how much he will beat them. I would say at least 1%. He should be holding your hand when the market tanks so you do not sell. He should be advising on all of your financial activity and major life events, not just retirement or investments.

Your company may also provide access to a financial planner as part of your 401k.

[TheShadow]

Charles Schwab has an excellent product now called Intelligent Portfolio. It is a portfolio that you design based upon your preferred risk profile. The funds are all high quality low fee exchange traded funds that are specially selected for this product. It is automatically rebalanced , which saves you the work of doing that. It also has the benefit of of automatically harvesting losses to offset gains thereby minimizing taxes. see this for more info:

https://intelligent.schwab.com/

It's truly a "set it and forget it" method of investing. I have half my funds in this and half in my own mix of funds, and the IP outperforms my stuff all the time, so you know what I'll be doing soon!

[rjm1cc]

Originally Posted by TheShadow

Charles Schwab has an excellent product now called Intelligent Portfolio. It is a portfolio that you design based upon your preferred risk profile. The funds are all high quality low fee exchange traded funds that are specially selected for this product. It is automatically rebalanced , which saves you the work of doing that. It also has the benefit of of automatically harvesting losses to offset gains thereby minimizing taxes. see this for more info:

https://intelligent.schwab.com/

It's truly a "set it and forget it" method of investing. I have half my funds in this and half in my own mix of funds, and the IP outperforms my stuff all the time, so you know what I'll be doing soon!

I looked at this and my main problem is that they keep a lot in cash. Keeping cash for years and years does not seem like a good deal. This type of product is offered by a number of online brokers and mutual funds and I am using one by another broker.

This is a good suggestion but I would also try and learn as much as you can.