can I put my IRA into something that is federally insured ?

Is it in Fidelity investment or Fidelity bank? You can certainly roll it into a bank IRA, which will be federally insured.

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The Wall Street Journal had an article on this yesterday:

What FDIC Covers On Bank Accounts By SHELLY BANJO July 14, 2008; Page A13

Q: What do depositors do if they have more than $100,000 they need to put in the bank?

A: One way to protect the money is to hold accounts under that sum at a few separate banks. For those wanting to keep money at the same institution, perhaps for convenience's sake, a sound strategy is to open different accounts.

For instance, a married couple could each open an individual account (up to $100,000 in each), a joint account (up to $200,000), two separate individual retirement accounts ($250,000 each) and two revocable trust accounts, payable on death, naming each other as beneficiaries ($100,000 each). Together that is more than $1 million of insured deposits.

Also, they could set up additional revocable trusts insured up to $100,000 for other qualified beneficiaries such as parents, siblings, children and grandchildren.

Q: Are there any pitfalls to this multiple-account, single-bank approach?

A: Depositors should make sure their accounts are properly titled at the bank. Bank employees may not always know the correct distinctions.

Because of misinformation from Countrywide Financial Corp., "I had $100,000 in funds uninsured for a considerable amount of time," says Scott Marberblatt of Swampscott, Mass. He held $100,000 in a certificate of deposit and put $100,000 in a savings account with two beneficiaries. But the bank did not properly title the savings account with the words "In Trust For," so the second $100,000 went uninsured.

If Countrywide had failed -- it ended up being acquired by much stronger Bank of America Corp. -- then he would have had a problem.

To verify all accounts are FDIC-insured, contact the FDIC consumer hot line at 1-877-275-3342 or use the deposit insurance calculator at

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You can buy federally insured CDs, or you can buy Treasury bonds, including TIPs (the Treasury Inflation Protected bonds - which actually should *only* be purchased in a tax-deferred or tax-free account).

Whether you want to or not, only you can know. But all those "safe" securities have the tradeoff that with safety comes much lower long-term returns. A retirement portfolio for generally needs something which will grow faster than that, unless it's a really huge portfolio to begin with.

Anyway, even inside that Fidelity account, you can buy CDs from multiple banks and easily spread it out so that no single bank has more than the FDIC limit worth of your money.

FDIC insures up to $100,000 per category of account per per bank (ie. you, your wife and a third account which is you and your wife jointly may all be $100,000 each), and up to $250,000 per qualifying retirement acounts (ie. IRAs go up to $250,000).

Note that if you have a brokerage CD and there's a failure at the bank, the FDIC insurance handles the claim a little differently than if you have a CD held directly at that bank.

offers some details about directly held assets (ie. in the case of IndyMac, all non-brokered deposits have been transferred to a newly chartered full-service bank called, unsurprisingly, IndyMac Federal Bank. Brokered deposits are being handled separately and it'd be up to your broker to handle much of it as far as I can tell.

I think the answer is yes, so long as the accounts are in different banks.

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So I just talked to Fidelity Investments, they said I can move my money into an IRA CD with them which they said is Federally insured, so that's my plan. Right now, my IRA is not federally insured. I set up an appointment next week to meet with them.

I had put $15,000 into gold last May and it has gone up $700, alot of my other stuff has gone down.

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it's in fidelity investments. Do I get penalized or have to pay a fee to move money out of fidelity ?

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The first question you want to ask Fidelity is, "In what is my IRA invested?"

Or check your records. Did you order that the money in the IRA be invested strictly in a money market account? A CD? What? Most likely, as a rolled over 401(k), it was invested in stock mutual funds.

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