Last year I found out that my employer was taking money out of my paycheck and sending it to a DCP when I worked over summers. I gained access to my account, and I moved all my money into the fund with the best performance that I could see. There was only a couple hundred dollars in the account so I didn't take it very seriously. Well, luckily for me, that fund was a Fidelity Income fund and was entirely invested in government bonds! In this economy I have made a 7% return on my investment!

Well now that I know a lot more and with my knowledge of the impending bond bubble burst, I just rebalanced my portfolio to only have 10% in bonds. I changed to a different fund with a lower expense ratio also. Hopefully I have played my cards right and in 2-3 years when I graduate and roll over that account, hopefully I will have seen decent growth. In the mean time, I'm using this fund as a testing ground for my own investing strategy (the rest of our retirement is invested according to my financial planner/brother's recommendations).

So H and I sat down tonight and worked a lot on our financial plan. Here are the changes:

1) We opened up a 36 month CD to for $15,000 of our house savings fund. This will earn us an additional $1,100 toward our goal.

2) We opened up another ING account. This one will be a Freedom Account to hold our savings toward large expenses such as insurance premiums and H's tuition. Now I don't have to worry about calculating that into my budget as a yearly expense.

3) We will be opening (tomorrow?) a Roth IRA. I feel kind of silly because we just went through a lot of trouble trying to open up a 403(b) through H's work and now we're going to stop funding it. I just realized (thanks to the forums)that with our income at a lifetime low, we would be better off paying the taxes now than when we retire. In addition we're unable to max out the IRA contributions right now as we save up for a house.

So I'm thinking we will use ING's ShareBuilder for the Roth IRA. Anyone got any experience or advice as to a good custodial company?