first, to people who wrote offlist and on: thank you for the great advice! One person gave me the low-down on these short-term reserve thingies, so now I feel like I have some klew as to what I'd put money into.
But! My bad. I was talking about open enrollment -- which includes signing up for all health care benefits every year and revisiting your 401k. The buzz last week was about changing health care providers. I was registering how pissed people were about the change and having to learn new policies, etc. Fortunately, our benefits actually got better from what I hear. I have the advantage of being married to someone who is retired military, so I have fab benefits. Which is pretty much the only reason we bothered to get married.
Meanwhile, yes the employer matches up to 5% -- which is the only reason I'd bother to put money in a 401k. As far as I can tell, I didn't lose any money in this recent rigamarole. In fact, I can't really understand what they hell I did make and why from the material they gave me. I mean, I have a number, a few hundred bucks. It looks to me like I made some ridiculous percentage -- like over 10% return -- which couldn't possibly be true, so that makes me think I'm misreading their chart.
I'll admit that I don't put effort into it, which is why I hate this -- and why people hate the switch over to a new health provider. It's the freakin' time you have to invest that's irritating. And you wade through reams and reams of rigamarole and don't feel as if you understand anything. It's like joanna has said for years and why the title of this post: some fucking choice. You have to spend so much time educating yourself that most people I know are making relatively uneducated choices. Like I said a couple of years ago when I first signed up. This guy I was working with, hired the same time as me, said: "I don't know what to do. So I took the quiz." IOW, he plugged in answers to 401k administrator's quiz and then did what they told him to do.
Some fucking "choice".
shag
Wear Clean Draws