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Friday, January 9, 2009

What to do with my 401K when I switch jobs or retire?

By Frank Dodd

You will hardly ever find a person that stays with the same company of employment for the entirety of their career. In fact, more than likely a person will change jobs and companies several times during their life. Since the majority of companies offer a 401k retirement package, these people that change companies may end up holding multiple 401k accounts under their name.

What should you do with your 401k fund after switching companies? You might look into a 401k rollover to IRA.

Rolling your 401k fund into an IRA can be beneficial in multiple ways. I'll briefly discuss a few of them.

For starters, imagine someone who changes companies 3 times in their life. That would leave them with 3 401k's from their previous employers and 1 from their current employer. That can get really messy for you. That means you would have 4 times the paperwork to keep up with and monitor to manage your portfolio the way you should. If you are like me, that extra paperwork may cause you to be lax in managing the account and could lead to financial ruin in your retirement years.

Transferring your 401k to an IRA will allow you to consolidate your retirement funds and reduce paperwork therefore making it easier on you to manage and make good decisions for the well being of your financial future. You are able to roll multiple 401k's in to one single IRA. So the person from the example above would only have to deal with their current employer's 401K and one IRA. Much better no?

By leaving your 401K plans in the management of your previous employers you also increase the risk of losing your retirement savings. Those companies may go under and leave you with next to nothing. But rolling over the accounts all into your personal IRA with a financial institution reduces your risk factor a great deal.

And the ultimate benefit is that you leave yourself in control of your own future instead of having others do it for you.

But I still recommend that you take advantage of the 401k options your current employer offers. Strive to contribute the maximum amount that they will match because doubling your investment is always a good deal. Then if you are able to contribute more than the maximum, put the extra in your IRA.

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