Ask Fidelity: How to Make the Most of Your IRA | Fidelity

In this video, Ken Hevert, SVP of Retirement of Retirement Income, and College Products answers the retirement question: “What can I do to make sure I’m getting the most out of my IRA?” To see more videos from Fidelity Investments, subscribe to: https://www.youtube.com/fidelityinvestments Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fidelityinvestments Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/fidelity Google+: https://plus.google.com/+fidelity LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fidelity-investments ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What can I do to make sure I’m getting the most out of my IRA? This is a great question because most IRA investors want to know that they’re taking the steps to get the most out of this very important investment. And by following a few basic rules of thumb, we believe you can accomplish your goals. First, make sure you’re saving on a regular basis and save as much as you can. Secondly, make sure that you’ve got the right mix of stocks, bonds, and cash. In other words, you don’t want to be too conservative and you don’t want to be too aggressive. And then third, make sure you’re taking advantage of tax-deferred compounding. An automatic investment program is a great way to put all three of these rules of thumb into action. It’s not uncommon for individuals to make contributions to their IRAs, to then have those contributions sitting in a money market or a cash account. In a way this almost defeats the purpose, because the goal is to grow that IRA so that you have more money in retirement to live on. But it’s important to know what your risk tolerance is and it’s also important to understand what your time horizon is. The longer your time horizon, meaning the longer before you start taking withdrawals, the more risk you can take, which means the more stocks you can have in your portfolio. It’s also common for investors to be concerned about timing the market. So a regular automatic investment program is a great way to take the guesswork and the emotion out of investing in your IRA. Once you have a feel for your risk tolerance, and how much you’re going to invest, you then want to consider how you’re going to go about choosing your investments. So one approach, of course, is that you can do your own research and pick your own stocks, bonds and cash. Another might be to use our Portfolio Advisory Services. And the third option is to use a “target date” fund, which changes the mix of stocks, bonds and cash as your time horizon changes. So if you’re a Fidelity customer and you want to set up an automatic investment program for your IRA, just log into your IRA on Fidelity.com, click on “update account features,” and add your automatic investment program. If you’re not a Fidelity customer, and you’d like to talk to us about opening an IRA and setting up an investment program, just call us anytime, or visit us online. Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC, Member NYSE, SIPC, 900 Salem Street, Smithfield, Rhode Island, 02917 731087.2.0

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