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SandburRanch
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Or anywhere else, especially over the past 7 years.
Your IRA Provider
- Thread starter SandburRanch
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Or anywhere else, especially over the past 7 years.
davesl708
Elite Member
I use Fidelity Funds. Manage my own. Before the internet you pretty much had to use a broker. I would make sure any investment he wanted to make for me he had his own money in.
California
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If you simply park your money in low-fee S&P index funds you will be in the top 15% of investors (ranked by long term results). That's good enough for me. As one of the posters noted above, a professional advisor throughout his career didn't exceed this performance. You don't need to share your returns with an advisor! You just need an account to perform transactions for you.
I started with IRA's under $10,000 at age 30, we continued to live cheap and save like mad, and I retired at age 54. We've never used credit for anything aside from real estate loans and paid-off-monthly credit cards. Avoid paying interest on anything you purchase, wait until you can afford it! Credit card interest can bleed away your income, and prevent accumulating savings, like you were supporting another phantom member of the family. Over years and decades the total cost you pay for interest is huge and this cost is entirely under your control.
Looking back I've put two kids through UC-Berkeley without student loans, and our savings today are at the same balance as the day I retired. My planning worked out better than I had hoped, largely because I was heavily invested in the stock run-up in the 80's and 90's.
Choose to be in the top 15%; do what is proven to work instead of what some hopeful 'advisor' suggests. The market is random, on average you're not going to exceed 'random minus fees' unless you are an insider to some specific firm's planning. For the retail investor, stock picking is a bet that the strategy you invented will exceed the average return of everyone out there betting against you. Considering advisor and transaction fees, the deck is stacked against exceeding the average of all other investors, many of whom have access to much better data than the retail investor sees.
I chose Fidelity for full-service brokerage/banking/IRA custodian. Vanguard is the other first-tier choice and returns slightly better returns to the customer due to slightly lower fees. I considered Vanguard, but they offer slightly less customer service, you can't phone Vanguard in the middle of the night for advice like you can Fidelity.
YMMV.
I started with IRA's under $10,000 at age 30, we continued to live cheap and save like mad, and I retired at age 54. We've never used credit for anything aside from real estate loans and paid-off-monthly credit cards. Avoid paying interest on anything you purchase, wait until you can afford it! Credit card interest can bleed away your income, and prevent accumulating savings, like you were supporting another phantom member of the family. Over years and decades the total cost you pay for interest is huge and this cost is entirely under your control.
Looking back I've put two kids through UC-Berkeley without student loans, and our savings today are at the same balance as the day I retired. My planning worked out better than I had hoped, largely because I was heavily invested in the stock run-up in the 80's and 90's.
Choose to be in the top 15%; do what is proven to work instead of what some hopeful 'advisor' suggests. The market is random, on average you're not going to exceed 'random minus fees' unless you are an insider to some specific firm's planning. For the retail investor, stock picking is a bet that the strategy you invented will exceed the average return of everyone out there betting against you. Considering advisor and transaction fees, the deck is stacked against exceeding the average of all other investors, many of whom have access to much better data than the retail investor sees.
I chose Fidelity for full-service brokerage/banking/IRA custodian. Vanguard is the other first-tier choice and returns slightly better returns to the customer due to slightly lower fees. I considered Vanguard, but they offer slightly less customer service, you can't phone Vanguard in the middle of the night for advice like you can Fidelity.
YMMV.
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