Bedrocked:

Funds have minimums, even if they are from the same family. So, for every Fidelity fund u buy, u have to shell out $2500 as the minimum. However, you can add the 500 u have to the fund that u bought recently, since most of them require a minimum additional investment of $100 or $200 only

chewychevy said:Any combination of money before the April 15th and afterwards but before December 31st totalling 5gs should allow you to avoid the fee.
You can invest 2005 Roth IRA contributions before April 15.

April 15th(2005) is the latest date you can add to your 2004 contributions of your IRA.

Jan 1st(2005), is the first day ou can add to your 2005 contributions.

I have 3000 in hand to try to figure out where to invest. After doing research on FW, I know a couple of companies.Please rank these bank to open Roth IRA: Schwab, Vanguard, Fidelity, Scottrade, Ameritrade. I like Scottrade and Fidelity because they have branches near my home. I can ask them if I have a question, I'm not good for investmeant(not my mojor). Also, I can max out by cash because I dont want to pay wire transfer of my CU, $25 per transaction. Any comments and advises are greatly appreciated. It's time to rush now, I just figure out this website and feel interest to start keeping Roth IRA. Again, thank you for your help.

thanks boden11...
I dont want to pay wire transfer, Brownco doesnt have any local office. How come I can open an account. They charge me $25 per transaction.

Hi there, I need a comment from you before I call the broker.
Okie, I want to open Roth IRA in Scottrade with $1000. I'm a fulltime student last year(until December2004) and get all Financial Aids, graduated after that. I have no job now, unemployment. So, what's distribution year is best for me 2004 or 2005. I'm afraid I got a trouble for 2004 and I already filled out Tax form.
thank you for your help.

If you have no idea what you are doing - go talk to a broker. As an financial consultant with a major brokerage firm I can say that the costs associated with dealing with a pro on this stuff really can be worth it for a lot of people.

Just take a look at what they recommend and do it yourself if you want to screw them...but seriously I think if you have no investment experience have someone else that you feel you can trust working with you on it.

Good luck to you - and dont bother with index funds...a good mutual fund manager really shines in down / sideways markets - which I think we're heading into.

Enjoy

fishzebby said:I need help on this too...
Vanguard charges $10.00 fee on each fund unless if your fund is below 5K or if your combined funds are under 50K. Anybody knows how much Fidelity charge for maintaining several funds ? I called Fidelity and asked a representative, he didn't answer me exactly. I am not sure about Schwab either. Any info will be greatly appreciated.Here's a direct quote from a Fidelity chat session:

"Our IRA accounts have no annual maintenance fee. Fidelity mutual funds with a balance below $2,000 on the valuation date (typically second Friday in November) are charged a $12 low balance fee."

But a no-fee IRA from some companies can cost more than an IRA with a $10-20 annual fee from a low-cost company like Vanguard.

bNeta86 said:If you have no idea what you are doing - go talk to a broker. As an financial consultant with a major brokerage firm I can say that the costs associated with dealing with a pro on this stuff really can be worth it for a lot of people.But what if the person chooses the wrong broker, such as the one in my city who once went bankrupt and who likes to sell variable annuities inside IRAs? Both the good and bad ones often sound the same to us laymen.

With only a couple of weeks left to make 2004 contributions to an IRA, I think that any undecided person shouldn't rush into anything that could turn out to be a mistake but just put the contribution into a money market fund IRA at a fund company that charges almost nothing in account maintenance or termination fees.

i found this out the hard way. something to consider is that vanguard seems to have lower initial buy-ins for funds, even with some non vanguard funds. i believe fidelity is $2500 minimum for any fund. so if you're just starting out vanguard allows you the ability to buy more funds with your max 2004/2005 contributions. theoretically if you just started in 2004 and you max last year and this year you could buy a max of 7 funds with vanguard and only 2 with fidelity.