Retirement & asset allocation of $30K for 30 year old single guy
I would definitely recommend putting some of this in an IRA. You can't put all $30K in an IRA immediately though, as the contribution limit is $5500/year for 2014, but until April 15 you can still contribute $5500 for 2013 as well. At your income level I would absolutely recommend a Roth IRA, as your income will very likely be higher in retirement, given that your income will almost certainly rise after you get your Ph.D. Your suggested asset allocation (70% stocks, 30% bonds) sounds appropriate; if anything you might want to go even higher on stocks assuming you won't mind seeing the value drop significantly. If you don't want to put a lot of energy into investment choices, I suggest a target retirement date fund. As far as I am aware, Vanguard offers the lowest expenses for these types of funds, e.g. this 2050 fund. IMHO bonds are not a good investment at this present time, nor generally. Appreciate for a moment that the yield of an investment is DIRECTLY related to the face/trading value. If a thing (bond/stock) trades for $100 and yields 3%, it pays $3.  In the case of a bond, the bond doesn't pay a % amount, it pays a $ amount.  Meaning it pays $3. SO, for the yield to rise, what has to happen to the trading price?  It has to decrease. As of 2013/14 bonds are trading at historically LOW yields.  The logical implication of this is if a bond pays a fixed $ amount, the trading price of the bond has to have increased.  So if you buy bonds now, you will see a decrease in its face value over the long term. You may find the first tool I built at Simple Stock Search useful as you research potential investments. If you want to invest in stocks, bonds and mutual funds I would suggest you take a portion of your inheritance and use it to learn how to invest in this asset class wisely. Take courses on investing and trading (two different things) in paper assets and start trading on a fantasy exchange to test and hone your investment skills before risking any of your money. Personally I don't find bonds to have a meaningful rate of return and I prefer stocks that have a dividend over those that don't. Parking some of your money in an IRA is a good strategy for when you do not see opportunities to purchase cashflow-positive assets right away; this allows you to wait and deploy your capital when the opportunity presents itself and to educate yourself on what a good opportunity looks like.
I think not. I think a discussion of optimum mix is pretty independent of age. While a 20 year old may have 40 years till retirement, a 60 year old retiree has to plan for 30 years or more of spending. I'd bet that no two posters here would give the same optimum mix for a given age, why would anyone expect the Wall Street firms to come up with something better than your own gut suggests? I have a $2500 Roth IRA that I set up 40 years ago...it is worth about $2600. I keep it around for this exact talking point.  Compound interest at .1% is outstripped by inflation.  I have put away $18k a year in a 401 for 30 years now. It is worth just under $800k.  The bankers took the excess with their 2% fee and the GFC.  Its all in Vanguard now  I cleared +$5m in medium and high end residential real estate in the same period.  The first 18 years was sleeping on floors and having cardboard boxes as furniture.   Sad really. "What percent of my salary should I save? is tightly coupled with its companion, What size “nest egg” should my husband and I have, and by what age? Interestingly, Mr.Christer's answer, 10%, is the number that plugs into the equation that I reference. Jay's 25X rule is part of this. We start with the assumption that one's required income at retirement will be 80% of their pre-retirement income. That's high by some observations, low by others. A quick look at the expenses that go away in retirement - The above can total 35-40% It would be great if it ended there, but there are costs that go up. The above extra spending is tough to nail down, after all, you knew what you spent, and what's going away, but the new items? Crapshoot. (For non-native speakers - this refers to a game with dice, meaning a random event) Again, referencing Mr Christer's answer ""financial planners whom you could pay to give you a very accurate number,"" I'm going to disagree with that soundbyte. Consider, when retirement is 30 years away, you don't know much If I can offer an analogy. I once had the pleasure of hearing Jim Lovell (The astronaut played by Tom Hanks in Apollo 13) give a speech. He said that for the first 99% of the trip to the moon, they simply aimed ahead of their target, never directly at the moon. In this manner, I suggest that with so many variables, accuracy is impossible, it's a moving target. Start young, take the 10% MrC offered, and keep saving. Every few years, stop and see if you are on target, if not, bump the number a bit.  Better to turn 50 and find that after a good decade you've reached your number and can drop your savings to a minimum, perhaps just to capture a 401(k) match, than to turn 50 and realize you've undersaved and need to bump to an unsustainable level. Imagine planning ahead in 1999. You've seen 2 great decades of returns, and even realizing that 18%/yr couldn't continue, you plan for a below average 7%, this would double your 1999 balance in 10 years. Instead you saw zero return. For a decade. In sum, when each variable has an accuracy of +/-50% you are not going to combine them all and get a number with even 10% accuracy (as if MrC were wrong, but the pro would tell you 11% is right for you?). This is as absurd as packaging up a bunch of C rated debt, and thinking that enough of this paper would yield a final product that was AAA." "I didn't even have access to a 401(k) at age 24.  You're starting early and that's good.  You're frugal and that's good too.  Retirement savings is really intended to be a set it and forget it kind of arrangement.  You check in on it once a year, maybe adjust your contributions.   While I applaud your financial conservatism, you're really hamstringing your retirement if you're too conservative.  At age 24 you have a solid 30 years before retirement will even approach your radar and another 10 years after that before you have to plan your disbursements.  The daily, monthly, quarterly movements of your retirement account will have literally zero impact on your life.    There will be money market type savings accounts, bond funds, equity funds, and lifecycle funds.  The lifecycle fund rolls your contributions to favor bonds and other ""safer"" investments as you age. The funds available in retirement accounts will all carry something called an expense ratio.  This is the amount of money that the fund manager keeps for maintaining the fund.  Be mindful of the expense ratios even more than the published performance of the fund.  A low fee fund will typically have an expense ratio around 0.10%, or $1 per $1,000 per year in expense.  There will be more exotic funds targeting this or that segment, they can carry expense ratios nearing 1% and some even higher. It's smart to take advantage of your employer's match.  Personally, at age 24, at a minimum I would contribute the match to a low-fee S&P index fund." I recommend saving for retirement first to leverage compound interest over a long time horizon. The historical real return on the stock market has been about 7%.  Assuming returns stay at 7% in the future (big assumption, but don't have any better numbers to go off of), then $8,000 saved today will be worth $119,795 in 40 years (1.07^40*8000).  Having a sizable retirement portfolio will give you peace of mind as you progress through life and make other expenditures. If you buy assets that pay you money and appreciate, you will be in a better financial position than if you buy assets that require significant cash outflows (i.e. property taxes, interest you pay to the bank, etc.) or assets that ultimately depreciate to zero (a car).  As a young person, you are well positioned to pay yourself (not the bank or the car dealership) and leverage compound interest over a long time horizon. "Defined benefit pensions are generally seen as valuable, and hard to replace by investing on your own. So my default assumption would be to keep that pension, unless you think there's a significant risk the pension fund will become insolvent, in which case the earlier you can get out the better. Obviously, you need to look at the numbers. What is a realistic return you could get by investing that 115K? To compare like with like, what ""real"" investment returns (after subtracting inflation) are needed for it to provide you with $10800 income/year after age 60? Also, consider that the defined benefit insulates you from multiple kinds of risk: Remember that most of your assets are outside the pension and subject to all these risks already. Do you want to add to that risk by taking this money out of your pension? One intermediate strategy to look at - again for the purposes of comparison - is to take the money now, invest it for 10 years without withdrawing anything, then buy an annuity at age 60. If you're single, Canadian annuity rates for age 60 appear to be between 4-5% without index linking - it may not even be possible to get an index-linked annuity. Even without the index-linking you'd need to grow the $115K to about $240K in 10 years, implying taking enough risks to get a return of 7.6% per year, and you wouldn't have index-linking so your income would gradually drop in real terms." the whole room basically jumped on me I really have an issue with this. Someone providing advice should offer data, and guidance. Not bully you or attack you.  You offer 3 choices. And I see intelligent answers advising you against #1. But I don't believe these are the only choices. My 401(k) has an S&P fund, a short term bond fund, and about 8 other choices including foreign, small cap, etc. I may be mistaken, but I thought regulations forced more choices. From the 2 choices, S&P and short term bond, I can create a stock bond mix to my liking. With respect to the 2 answers here, I agree, 100% might not be wise, but 50% stock may be too little. Moving to such a conservative mix too young, and you'll see lower returns.  I like your plan to shift more conservative as you approach retirement.   Edit - in response to the disclosure of the fees -  1.18% for Aggressive, .96% for Moderate I wrote an article 5 years back, Are you 401(k)o'ed in which I discuss the level of fees that result in my suggestion to not deposit above the match. Clearly, any fee above .90% would quickly erode the average tax benefit one might expect. I also recommend you watch a PBS Frontline episode titled The Retirement Gamble It makes the point as well as I can, if not better.  The benefit of a 401(k) aside from the match (which you should never pass up) is the ability to take advantage of the difference in your marginal tax rate at retirement vs when earned. For the typical taxpayer, this means working and taking those deposits at the 25% bracket, and in retirement, withdrawing at 15%. When you invest in a fund with a fee above 1%, you can see it will wipe out the difference over time. An investor can pay .05% for the VOO ETF, paying as much over an investing lifetime, say 50 years, as you will pay in just over 2 years.  They jumped on you? People pushing funds with these fees should be in jail, not offering financial advice. Getting to know business associates, family members, and friends of your those 30 high net-worth clients would be a good way to go. I feel mid-career folks are an untapped market. Consider the present value of any younger clients before you dismiss them because they are below the threshold. A 30 year old professional with only $100k may be more valuable than a 75 year old with $250k. Good luck. I would focus first on maxing out your RRSPs (or 401k) each year, and once you've done that, try to put another 10% of your income away into unregistered long term growth savings. Let's say you're 30 and you've been doing that since you graduated 7 years ago, and maybe you averaged 8% p.a. return and an average of $50k per year salary (as a round number).  I would say you should have 60k to 120k in straight up investments around age 30.  If that's the case, you're probably well on your way to a very comfortable retirement. "Making these difficult portfolio decisions for you is the point of Target-Date Retirement Funds.  You pick a date at which you're going to start needing to withdraw the money, and the company managing the fund slowly turns down the aggressiveness of the fund as the target date approaches.  Typically you would pick the target date to be around, say, your 65th birthday.  Many mutual fund companies offer a variety of funds to suit your needs. Your desire to never ""have to recover"" indicates that you have not yet done quite enough reading on the subject of investing.  (Or possibly that your sources have been misleading you.)  A basic understanding of investing includes the knowledge that markets go up and down, and that no portfolio will always go up.  Some ""recovery"" will always be necessary; having a less aggressive portfolio will never shield you completely from losing money, it just makes loss less likely. The important thing is to only invest money that you can afford to lose in the short-term (with the understanding that you'll make it back in the long term).  Money that you'll need in the short-term should be kept in the absolute safest investment vehicles, such as a savings account, a money market account, short-term certificates of deposit, or short-term US government bonds." Pete, 25 years of inflation looks like 100% to me with back of napkin math. $220K will feel like $110K. In today's dollars, can you live on $110K?  (Plus whatever Social Security you'll get)? My concern from what you wrote, if I'm reading it correctly, is that you have this great income, but relatively low savings until now.  From the recent question Building financial independence I offered a guide to savings as it compares to income.  Even shifted 5 years for a later start, and scaled for a 70-75% replacement ratio, you should be at 2X (or $440K) by now. That's not a criticism, but an observation that you've been spending at a nice clip so far. The result is less saving, of course, but also a need for a higher replacement ratio.  Last, a 10% return for the next 25 years may be optimistic. I'm not forecasting doom or gloom, just a more reasonable rate of return, and wouldn't plan to see higher than 7-8% for purposes of planning. If I am wrong, (and if so, we can both laugh all the way to the bank) you can always scale back savings in 10-15 years. Or retire earlier.  Note: Pete's question asks about a 40 year old working till 65, but the comment below has him 48 and planning to work until 62. 14 years of $45K deposits total less than $700K. Even at 10%, it wouldn't grow to much more than $2M, let alone $5M. "I'm going to discuss this, in general, as specific investment advice isn't allowed here. What type of account is the $60K in now? I mean - Is it in a 401(k), IRA or regular account/CD/money market?  You are still working? Does your company offer any kind of matched 401(k)? If so, take advantage of that right up the level they'll match. If not, are you currently depositing to pretax IRAs? You can't just deposit that $60K into an IRA if it isn't already, but you can put $11k/yr ($5 for you, $6K for hubby if you make $11K or more this year.) Now, disclaimer, I am anti-annuity. Like many who are pro or con on issues, this is my nature. The one type of annuity I actually like is the Immediate Annuity. The link is not for an end company, it shows quotes from many and is meant as an example. Today, a 65 yr old man can get $600/mo with a $100K purchase. This is 7.2%, in an economy in which rates are sub 3%. You give up principal in exchange for this higher annual return.  This is a viable solution for the just-retired person whose money will run out when looking at a 4-5% withdrawal but 1% CD rate. In general, these products are no more complex that what I just described, unlike annuities sold to younger fold which combine high fees with returns that are so complex to describe that most agents can't keep their story straight.  Aside from the immediate flavor, all other annuities are partial sold (there's a quote among finance folk - ""annuities are sold, not bought"") based on their tax deferral features. I don't suspect you are in a tax bracket where that feature has any value to you.  At 48/54, with at least 10 years ahead of you, I'd research 'diversification' and 'asset allocation'. Even $60K is enough to proper invest these funds until you retire and then decide what's right for you.   Beginners' Guide to Asset Allocation, Diversification, and Rebalancing is an interesting introduction, and it's written by the SEC, so your tax dollars paid for it.  Some months ago, I wrote Diversifying to Reduce Risk, which falls short of a complete discussion of asset allocation, but it does illustrate the power of being in a stock/bond mix. The ups and downs were reduced significantly compared to the all stock portfolio.  (for follow up or to help others reply to you, a bit more detail on the current investments, and how you are devastated, eg was there a huge loss from what you had a few years ago?) Edit - The original poster hasn't returned. Posted the question and left. It's unfortunate as this was someone who would benefit from the dialog, and the answers here can help others in a similar position, but I feel more discussion is in order for the OP. Last, I caught a downvote on my reply today. I take no offense, but curious which part of my answer the DVer disagreed with." You can invest more that 20,000 in Infrastructure bonds, however the tax benefit is only on 20,000. Further the interest earned is taxable. The best guaranteed post tax returns is on PPF. So invest a substantial sum in this. As your age group low you can afford to take risk and hence could also look at investing in ELSS [Mutual Fund].   A note on each of these investments:  LIC: If you have taken any of the endowment / Money Back plan, remember the returns are very low around 5-6%. It would make more sense to buy a pure term plan at fraction of the cost and invest the remaining premium into even PPF or FD that would give you more return.  NSC/Postal Savings: They are a good option, however the interest is taxable. There is a locking of 6 years.  PPF: The locking is large 15 years although one can do partial withdrawals after 7 years. The interest is not taxable.  ULIP: These are market linked plans with Insurance and balance invested into markets. The charges for initial few years is quite high, plus the returns are not comparable to the normal Mutual Funds. Invest in this only if one needs less paper and doesn't want to track things separately.  ELSS/Mutual Fund: These offer good market returns, but there is a risk of market. As you are young you can afford to take the risk. Most of the ELSS have given average results that are still higher than FD or PPF.  Pension Plan: This is a good way to accumulate for retirement. Invest some small amount in this and do not take any insurance on it. Go for pure equity as you can still take the risk. This ensures that you have a kit for retirement. Check out the terms and conditions as to how you need to purchase annuity at the term end etc. Your plan sounds quite sound to me.  I think that between the choices of [$800 for Loans, $300 for Retirement] and [$1100 for loans], both are good choices and you aren't going to go wrong either way.   Some of the factors you might want to consider: I like your retirement savings choices - I myself use the admiral version of VOO, plus a slightly specialized but still large ETF that allows me to do a bit of shifting.  Having something that's at least a bit counter-market can be helpful for balancing (so something that will be going up some when the market overall is down some); I wouldn't necessarily do bonds at your age, but international markets are good for that, or a stock ETF that's more stable than the overall market.  If you're using Vanguard, look at the minimums for buying Admiral shares (usually a few grand) and aim to get those if possible, as they have significantly lower fees - though VOO seems to pretty much tie the admiral version (VFIAX) so in that case it may not matter so much. As far as the target retirement funds, you can certainly do those, but I prefer not to; they have somewhat higher (though for Vanguard not crazy high) expense ratios.  Realistically you can do the same yourself quite easily. "Welcome to the 'what should otherwise be a simple choice turns into a huge analysis' debate. If the choice were actually simple, we've have one 'golden answer' here and close others as duplicate. But, new questions continue to bring up different scenarios that impact the choice.  4 years ago, I wrote an article in which I discussed The Density of Your IRA. In that article, I acknowledge that, with no other tax favored savings, you can pack more value into the Roth.  In hindsight, I failed to add some key points. First, let's go back to what I'd describe as my main thesis: A retired couple hits the top of the 15% bracket with an income of   $96,700. (I include just the standard deduction and exemptions.) The   tax on this gross sum is $10,452.50 for an 'average' rate of 10.8%. The tax, paid or avoided, upon deposit, is one's marginal rate. But,   at retirement, the withdrawals first go through the zero bracket (i.e.   the STD deduction and exemptions), then 10%, then 15%. The above is the simplest snapshot. I am retired, and our return this year included Sch A, itemized deductions. Property tax, mort interest, insurance, donations added up fast, and from a gross income (IRA withdrawal) well into the 25% bracket, the effective/average rate was reported as 7.3%. If we had saved in Roth accounts, it would have been subject to 25%.  I'd suggest that it's this phenomenon, the ""save at marginal 25%, but withdraw at average sub-11%"" effect that account for much of the resulting tax savings that the IRA provides.  The way you are asking this, you've been focusing on one aspect, I believe. The 'density' issue. That assumes the investor has no 401(k) option. If I were building a spreadsheet to address this, I'd be sure to consider the fact that in a taxable account, long term gains are taxed at 15% for higher earners (I take the liberty to ignore  that wealthier taxpayers will pay a maximum 20% tax on long-term capital gains. This higher rate applies when your adjusted gross income falls into the top 39.6% tax bracket.) And those in the 10 or 15% bracket pay 0%. With median household income at $56K in 2016, and the 15% bracket top at $76K, this suggests that most people (gov data shows $75K is 80th percentile) have an effective unlimited Roth. So long as they invest in a way that avoids short term gains, they can rebalance often enough to realize LT gains and pay zero tax.  It's likely the $80K+ earner does have access to a 401(k) or other higher deposit account. If they don't, I'd still favor pretax IRAs, with $11K for the couple still 10% or so of their earnings. It would be a shame to lose that zero bracket of that first $20K withdrawal at retirement. Again working backwards, the $78K withdrawal would take nearly $2M in pretax savings to generate. All in today's dollars."