Dan Ostrov's Financial advice for 401(k) investing
When you start work, you'll need to start investing in your 401(k).
Here's a PowerPoint presentation
with some advice for how to invest showing, surprisingly, that
the most lucrative methods of investing also happen to be among the most simple and least time
consuming.
To predict how much money you will have in retirement or to compare the effects of two
different financial scenarios on the money you'll have when you retire, you can use this "until retirement" Excel spreadsheet. To predict
how much money you'll have after retiring or to compare the effects of two
different financial scenarios on how much money you'll have after you retire, you can use this "after retirement" Excel spreadsheet.
How important are index funds to successful retirement investing? Extremely. Check out
the second half
of this recent Frontline
from PBS (the first half is great too) or this report on individual investing from
NPR or
this NPR report on your company 401(k) offerings. Finally, Ron Lieber goes as far as to
argue in his
New York Times column that companies should actually be sued for not offering index funds in
their 401(k) plan offerings
here.