Several weeks ago, I was exchanging instant messages with a relative in the United States. He’s originally from Malaysia but emigrated to the States in the 1990s. He is now only 46 and recently, he wrote to tell me that he had already left his old job and gone on to newer, better pastures.
“So with your higher salary, you should be contributing more to your 401(k), isn’t it?” I asked him. My understanding of the 401(k) is very shallow but I believe it is somewhat akin to the EPF we have here, or the CPF that’s in Singapore.
Yes, he replied but he sighed. More in his 401(k), he said, but he doubted his retirement savings would be enough for him to maintain his current lifestyle eventually.
That, unfortunately, is a fear that’s being faced by people everywhere: a fear that our retirement savings are insufficient to carry us on through the remaining years of our lives.
Inflation is the greatest enemy of retirement savings and just simply keeping our money in the banks without thinking about the best way to make money work for us means that the value of our savings gets eaten away.
Maybe, gold is still the best bet for anyone to make a good investment choice and in the United States, I hear that it’s now possible – or maybe it has been going on for a few years – to open a Gold Individual Retirement Account or Gold IRA. (It’s also known as Gold 401k.) What this means is that the contributions in the 401(k) are invested into gold and held there in the retirement account.
I hear that it’s also quite easy to sell off the IRA Gold or the 401k Gold and have the proceeds placed into other investment options such as stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and money market accounts. The Gold IRA transfer, one way or the other, should be effected quite fast, within days of initiating the process.
So I suppose this is what my relative should be looking at: maximising the returns on his 401(k).