Sam Taube

Hey Elizabeth.

Hey Sean.

Always happy to be here.

A 401k rollover is the process of taking money out of an old 401k and putting it into a 401k at your current job or into an IRA, into a new retirement account.

As long as the money ends up in a tax-advantaged retirement account within 60 days, it's not treated as a taxable withdrawal.

Personally, I tend to treat 401 rollovers as part of my sort of new job checklist whenever I change jobs.

I do it as soon as I'm settled into the new place.

Because a new job already means filling out a lot of tax and HR paperwork, so I think you might as well fill out a form to rollover your old 401 while you're at it.

A lot of the big custodians like Vanguard or Fidelity let you do this online, but there are still a few that might require you to print out a form and fill it out in pen and, like, fax it or mail it somewhere.

Regardless, it often takes a few days to process a rollover.

Well, the thing that kind of trumps any sort of advantage of the old 401k to me is that you generally can't contribute to a 401k from an old job that you no longer work at.

And also it can get kind of annoying to just keep track of a bunch of different logins and a bunch of different accounts.

And so just consolidating everything together where you can track it easily and also where you can contribute to it easily.

That's a big advantage of doing the rollover.

Right.

Target date funds can be really convenient because they let you be completely hands off.

You don't have to adjust their allocation over time because they do that automatically themselves.

But there are a couple things to look out for when you're choosing a target date fund.

Ideally, you want one that will keep automatically adjusting itself past your retirement year, but some of them just kind of freeze the allocation when you retire.

Also, fees are something to watch out for.