Roth IRA would be good. If you have been reading about them you may have found out that you can take the funds you put in, called your principal, anytime. You can not pull out interest until the account has been set up for 5 years and you are at least 59 1/2.
So you can put in mutual funds that are made up of stocks inside you're Roth. Right now the values are down so it is a perfect time. If you are dealing with $2,500, alot of fund companies have minimums that are $500, so find maybe three domestic large cap funds(butual funds that invest primarily in large companies located in the US) it is believed that these are little safer because we the strongest country in the world, then maybe take the other two $500 and find a couple of international funds that are down. The good thing about mutual funds is that each fund probably has 50-100 stocks, so this helps to off set individual security risk.
You probably do want to accumulate 3-6 months income in a money market for cash reserves. No penalties, it is stable, and you can write checks.
Thanks,
Jason
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