One Year Ago Today

One year ago today I opened a Roth IRA with Vanguard. I started with just $1000 and my first pick was the Vanguard Star Fund (VGSTX). This is a great pick for a newbie investor due to the minimum required initial amount of $1000 and the fund's broad diversification of roughly 60/40 stocks/bonds. Since I started almost half way through the year, I had $3000 left to contribute for 2007. I setup a weekly automatic payment plan to withdraw $107 until I met the limit of $4000 for 2007. This was a daunting task at the time being that I had never invested before and it seemed like a heavy commitment, almost 30 weeks of $100+ payments!

I picked Vanguard because of Get Rich Slowly, I had started regularly reading this site during downtime at work and a series of articles demystifying the Roth IRA clearly explained the reasons I needed to open one immediately and even going so far as explaining how I could open one right from the comfort of my chair. VGSTX was touted as the least expensive option with a very low expense ratio. Vanguard charges $20 annual if you sign up for paperless statements until you have $10,000 in your account with no initial setup fees. I went for it and haven't been the same since. I'll explain where I went from there and all my other investments since in coming posts.