It’s open enrollment season right now and I’m a little bit bummed. For the past few weeks, I’ve been getting text messages from my previous employer (which happens to be the State of Minnesota) reminding me to enroll in my workplace benefits for the coming year. Since I no longer work for the state, I […]
Investing
What Is The Best 529 Plan – A Guide To Choosing Your College Savings Plan
Until a few years ago, I’d never heard of a 529 plan. A basic description is that a 529 plan is essentially a Roth IRA that can only be used for educational expenses. Money goes into the 529 plan post-tax, grows tax-free within the plan, and can then be withdrawn tax-free at any time so […]
Don’t Get Taken Advantage Of When It Comes To Your Retirement Plan For Work
One of the things you have to figure out whenever you start a new job is what retirement plan options your new employer offers. If you’re lucky, you’ll be in a job that has a good retirement plan that doesn’t take too much work to set up. That’s the situation I was in when I got my […]
For The New Investor – It Doesn’t Matter What The Market Is Doing Now
A question I often get from people beginning their working careers is whether they should wait for the market to cool off a bit before they get started investing. For the new investor, my response is always the same – ignore whatever the market is doing and just get started now. Of course, I totally […]
What To Do With Your 401k When You Change Jobs
Now that I’ve recently changed jobs, I’m once again trying to figure out what to do with all of my old retirement accounts. Luckily, I’ve got a little bit of experience in this area. I’ve switched jobs twice in a little over a year – first leaving my biglaw associate position to work as a […]
WiseBanyan Review: A Free Robo Advisor
I’m always on the lookout for tools that I think can make investing easier for people. While we personal finance writers think of investing as really straightforward, the truth is, the logistics of investing really isn’t as simple as we make it out to be. It’s easy for us because we’ve spent hundreds of hours reading and learning about money and investing. Tell me to put my money in a total market fund with Vanguard and I can do that pretty easily. But tell your average person to do the same and I guarantee they won’t understand how to do that.
In an ideal world, investing would be as easy as opening up a bank account. Your average person could just go online, open up an investment account, and then walk away without having to make any decision other than deciding how much money to put into their account.