Best RothIras to invest

[Guest enolito]

Hello everybody:

I'm a new kid in the block trying to get some useful information about the best ROTHIRAS to pick one an invest my money. I don't know where to search for that information. Anything will be helful to me and highly appreciated.

Thanks,

EM

[John G]

Congratulations on getting started.

You need to make two decisions. First, you need to pick a custodian and these include banks, stock brokers, and mutual funds (or fund families) whose role is to control/supervise your assets. Second, you need to choose a type of investment such as money market account, CD, bonds, stock, specific mutual fund, etc. You can always change both decisions down the road.

Since Roth IRA investments often involve many decades of investing, I am not a big fan of low return options like CDs, which ussually means that banks are not a great choice. When an investor just gets started, buying individual stocks is often not very practical and ussually means little diversification. Therefore I would recommend that you initially take the mutual fund route. Note, you can either do this directly with a mutual fund family like Vanguard, Janus, 20th Century, etc. (there are more than 8000 mutual funds) or use a broker like Schwab, Etrade, Ameritrade, etc. that gives you access to mutual funds.

Check out the March issue of Consumer Reports for a good overview of retirement investments and a culled down list of 100+ mutual funds. I highly recommend NO LOAD funds that do not charge up commissions. Other good sources for info include Kiplinger Finance, Money and Worth magazines. Every mutual fund and brokerage seems to have info on the WWW these days as well.

If you want a very simple plan for getting started: Call Vanguard and select their S&P500 Index fund. You then indirectly own a small piece of 500 companies. Low annual fund expense. Diversified. Simple.

You may want to read the comments under "young whipper snapper" Jamison and "help me get started" by Harley at this site.

Got specific Qs or personal issues? I will try and respond by email.