The Sun's Financial Diary

If you are thinking of putting aside a little more for your retirement in 2010, you won’t get any help from the government because the 2010 401(k) contribution limit will remain at the same level as 2009 at $16,500 (the catch-up limit for workers 50 years old and order will also be the same as [...]

Don’t borrow money from your 401(k) account unless you absolutely have to. If you have to, pay it back as soon as possible.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week issued a warning on using 401(k) debit card to tap into retirement funds to pay for daily living expenses. As the slowed economy put the [...]

Everybody agrees in general that a 401(k) loan or a 401(k) debit card is a bad, bad idea. For those of us who don’t have a guaranteed pension plan and can’t rely on social security, 401(K), as well as other individual retirement savings accounts, is one major tool to save for retirement when our pre-retirement [...]

According to a NY Times article (registration required) yesterday, the US Supreme Court has ruled on February 20th that workplace retirement plan participants can sue the plan administrator to recover their losses under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974.
The case, LaRue vs. DeWolff 06-856, is filed by James LaRue of Southlake, Texas, who [...]

My wife’s employer started to offer Roth 401(k) plan through Fidelity this year. While it’s good to know that there’s a new saving vehicle available, we decided not to participate after examining the pros and cons of the plan at that time. The main reason was that it doesn’t offer more benefits than the traditional [...]

The recent market plunge has generated quite some debate among PF bloggers what we should do (if we should do anything at all) with our investments in the event that major indexes lost 5% in just a couple of days:

Should we see it as a buying opportunity?
Should we re-evaluate our investment strategy?
Or should we simply [...]

I got this idea when I was visiting MoneyMonk yesterday and reading his post on saving a little more in 401(K) by contributing 20% for the first three months and 12% for the rest nine months of the year. Since I started to contribute to my 401(k) plan, I always set a fixed percentage point [...]

Everybody trades, more or less, and I do too. For me, most of the trades were in brokerage accounts with individual stocks. For mutual fund accounts, there were far more buys than sells. But for 401(k) account, so far there seemed to be only buys, no sells. Actually, the only activities in my 401(k) plan [...]

My wife has been with her current company for nearly five years and her employer offers a match for the first 6% of her 401(k) contributions. The only catch is the match is given in company stocks in the form a fund. Ever since she joined the company, she maxed out every year and now [...]

An article in yesterday's USAToday prompted to check the fees I paid for those funds in my 401(k) plan. Unlike mutual funds holding in my taxable accounts, in which I have the flexibility to choose from perhaps hundreds of funds in the same category from as many companies, the number of funds in my 401(k) [...]