Any investment advice??

I would start by reviewing a few books on investing and asset allocation. I found the ones by Larry Swedroe (The Only Guide to a Winning Investment Strategy You'll Ever Need), William Bernstein (The Intelligent Asset Allocator and The Four Pillars of Investing), and The Bogleheads Guide to Investing. I found all of these in my public library, they are also easily available for purchase.

Web sites I recommend are:

This site is for a professional portfolio management company, which won't be of use to you at this stage, but they have a good free risk assessment quiz and all their model portfolios are available to look at. Those are implemented with DFA funds, which are not available to the individual, but you can get an idea of the asset classes they recommend.

This goes over available choices in various asset classes, such as mutual funds and ETFs.

You'll find recommended portfolios for various mutual fund companies, and many company 401(k) plans.

William Bernstein's site, with many helpful articles and links.

A forum site for folks dedicated to the "boglehead" way, proposed by Vanguard found John Bogle.

Brian

Yes, you need a long term plan. The result of this long term plan will be the realization (I hope) that worrying about the current performance of the market is not an issue, because you expect 40 years later (2050) that the market will be 3X-10X maybe 100X higher than where it is now.

If you do not think the market will go up in the future, you need to find a better investment.

You should do some of the planning tools on the Fidelity web site. I might also suggest looking at T Rowe Price or Vanguard for a second opinion.

You will elarn about stocks and bonds, domestic and foreign investments, you might also read about large caps,mid caps and small caps. Maybe emerging markets, technology, energy and other companies. How you pick amongst these is called asset allocation.

Once you understand asset allocation, pick one.

Like 100% equities from age 24-34 Then add 1% bonds per year from age 35-55 (so you are 80% equity, 20% bonds at age 55). Then maybe add 2% bonds per year from age 55-65 (so you are 60-40 at age 65).

You might pick another (like 80% equities now, 20% bonds now) and stick with it until you are 75.

The 2050 fund is probably making similar moves anyways- it will allocate for you. It might start out with more bonds at age 24, but the devil is in the details.

If you know enough to pick an allocation and implement it, that is the start of a good plan.

That's a pretty decent "life cycle" fund - it's a diversified mix of underlying investments which is going to get more and more conservative (it's very aggressive now) as you approace a "target" retirement year of 2050. T.Rowe Price and Vanguard also have very decent versions of the same. There's nothing at all wrong with them and, while an individual may be able to do better by constructing a portfolio on his own, these are still vastly better than not doing so - which makes them great choices for a lot of folks.

Many folks open a brokerage account and buy mutual funds inside that account. Fidelity and Schwab and ETrade and the rest all give you access to enormous lists of funds within your brokerage account for no transaction fee, and even more if you are willing to pay such fees. We've been very happy with Fidelity brokerage accounts and most of the accounts we have contain nothing but mutual funds.

If you're really in it for the long haul, don't worry too much about buying more or less when the market is up or down. Just keep putting in regular contributions as you go.

Forgetting for a moment what you actually asked for, here's a tidbit from my history that really, really helped us out in the long haul.

We both (wife and I (girlfriend at the time -- we married much later) continued to live the PoorCollegeStudent lifestyle for nearly a full 2 years after graduating college and getting the first job.

We lived in the same off-campus housing (large house with

4 additional room-mates (typical of PoorCollegeStudents)) Both our shares of the rent/phone/electric/water bill didn't add up to even $200 a month, combined.

Where else can ya live that cheap.

We both had good professional jobs after graduating and matching salaries (she CPA, me software developer) but lived like we were used to living while we were paying for school -- e.g. Dirt.Poor.

This allowed us to pay off all student loans, most of the credit cards, save up most of the down for our first home, start the emergency fund, and generally gave us a huge head-start over our peers who move out into new expensive apartments/homes and bought a brand new car.

If ya can give it a year or two of making that kind of salary, and manage to put 1/3 or more of it away for a year or three, you'll be really, really, really happy you did it.

Just 'cause the income makes a nice jump to the 85-90K range doesn't mean you have to spend it all.

As a comparison, combined our during college income was a bit over $21,000 -- flipping burgers, delivering pizzas, and a few paying band gigs at the local bar -- good income for 15 years ago and being college students (back when minimum wage was $3.10 an hour) .

The first jobs out of school, combined, put us at over triple that. We kept living like we only had the $21,000 for nearly 2 years. We were able to put 2/3 of our combined income to productive use.

Just some advice. It worked for us. YMMV.

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Another trick along that line: Every time I got a raise, I increased my credit union paycheck deduction by half the amount of the raise. After taxes, that put a little more spending money in my pocket and a lot more in savings. Since I never saw the raise, it was pretty painless.

-- Doug