401(k) Retirement Plan Participant Advice
Yesterday I was at Salesforce.com’s World Tour event in Chicago. First of all, I’d like to just say that Salesforce knows how to produce an event. Really well done. I was there because we are moving to use SFDC more broadly across NWPS (Service Cloud) and I needed to learn more and talk to both product experts and peers. That mission was accomplished.
A funny thing happened though. Lots of the people I talked to were young product, sales or sales engineering people working for SFDC and their partners. In all of these conversations I had to describe our business so they could help me. At some point in many of these conversations the person who was helping me came around to asking what they should do with their 401(k) plan.
I am not a registered financial advisor so I’m not allowed to give investment advice, but it turns out that isn’t necessary to help them because the answer is easy. I only had to ask two questions.
- Are you maxing out contributions? If not, what is your plan to get there?
- Is your money sitting in a money market of stable value fund? If yes, then you should talk to someone about diversifying or move it to your plan’s TDF.
Max out your contributions, invest for the long run and you’ll be fine.