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Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Consolidate Your 401k's Into An IRA

By Frank Dodd

Most people wind up switching companies several times in the course of their lives. Hardly ever does a person stay with 1 employer their entire working life. Many companies offer a 401k plan as part of their benefits package. This leaves many people with multiple 401k funds in their name in their career course.

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

There are many benefits that you get from rolling over your 401k into an IRA. Now we'll go over a few of them.

To begin, if a person changes companies 3 times, they will own 4 401k policies (3 from the previous employers and 1 from the new one). Having multiple accounts can be difficult to manage. You would have to follow paper on all 4 accounts instead of just 1. And most people will get discouraged by the excess paperwork and stop taking the needed interest in their portfolio. This can create huge problems down the road.

Putting your previous 401k accounts into an IRA will consolidate your retirement plans and make life a lot easier. You will reduce paper and be able to pay better attention where it counts. Changing jobs 3 times would not matter. You could roll as many 401k's as you'd like into the one IRA. And the person above would only have 2 accounts instead of 4 (1 IRA and 1 401K with the current employer.

Also, Leaving your retirement plans in the hands of your previous employers is a bit risky. If the company goes bankrupt you lose everything. Transferring and consolidating those accounts all into 1 IRA with a separate financial institution is much less risky.

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

The 401K offers to match your investment 100%, and you don't see an offer like that from most investment opportunities. So take advantage of it and contribute the maximum that the employer will match. Then put the extra funds into your IRA.

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