At OP - I was where you are about 4 years ago and wondering the same thing. Should I pick my own stocks, experiment, start small? I had lots of questions on what to do and honestly made it more difficult than it needs to be. Just keep it simple. Open a Roth IRA with Vanguard, Fidelity, or some other low cost broker, buy a target fund or total market fund and feed it every month until you max out for the year. I use Vanguard and their minimum is $1000 for one of the target funds. Join your company's 401k as soon as your able and put in at least enough to get the company match (more if you can).

Stock picking sounds cool but in reality it's extremely difficult to beat the market and you're better off buying an index fund.

1 ...

Report Post

Posted by Retrograde

Member since Jul 2014

2900 posts

Posted on 10/30/14 at 5:31 pm to dlmast87

Your contributions should look like this (when you are able to contribute to 401K)

1. Invest in your 401K up to the contribution limit
2. Max out IRA
3. Max out 401K

From there you are looking at taxable accounts (except for munis and variable annuities, neither of which you should be concerned with at your age).

For now you can get in something like https://advisors.vanguard.com/VGApp/iip/site/advisor/investments/productoverview?fundId=0932.

You can create the account online.

The rule of thumb is 100 - age for the ratio of equities you want to be in, but it might as well be 95% for most people under 30.

Remember the average return for an individual investor picking his own stocks usually hovers around 5%. Wait until you have play money available to start play money accounts.

***Before investing I would save up for a downpayment on a house.

This post was edited on 10/30/14 at 5:32 pm

2 ...

Report Post

Money Talk - Replies to Post

Return To Board

Page 1

Return To Board