Monday, January 12, 2009

IRA 401K

By Crystal Castillo

Planning for the future is super important. Nobody wants to still be working when they are 70 years old, and no one wants to have to depend on their children to take care of them financially.

How do we avoid that? There are many different retirement planning methods to choose from. I'd like to discuss briefly an IRA and a 401K.

IRA 401K A 401k is a retirement fund usually managed by a person's employer. The employer will usually offer to match dollar for dollar the contributions of an employee up to a certain amount or up to a certain number of years. There are several reasons for this.

The employer has to have so many dollars on hand for everything in each employee's benefit package. So by offering to match your contributions, they are encouraging you to invest in the 401k fund, and they thus get more on hand dollars to invest and to claim.

Too, they will usually take the funds and invest in either in-house business or market funds. This generates earnings from the money you the worker has contributed. So when you retire they get to pay you back with mostly your money or the earnings from your own money.

An IRA is also called an Individual Retirement Account. They help ease the strain on Social Security by allowing benefints and incentive to the account holder for investing in their own retirement instead of relying solely on their 401K offered by their employer. Because if the employer goes down the 401K is litterally worthless.

Many differnt IRA's exist to suit different people's needs. Research them and talk to a financial advisor to find which one is right for you.

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