Investing/Retirement question
 

I have been sitting on an old 401K for a company I no longer work for. I left that money untouched for the past 8 years. It has almost doubled in value during that time.

I am really considering taking that money and transferring it to a Robinhood Gold IRA. They are doing a 3% match through the end of April if you sign up for the Gold (must keep Gold for 1 year $5 per month fee) I am well outside of the 5 year agreement for the IRA they require before penalty for early withdraw. I am figuring 7-9 years before Retirement.

I know very little about Robinhood. My current 401K is with Voya, and the fees are less than 1.5% annual. I would have to rollover to a traditional IRA as 98% of my 401K was before tax.

Is Robinhood any good for just setting up an IRA and not "investing" with it?

What do you mean by not “investing” an IRA? What kind of balance do you have in what you’re going to roll over? 7-9 years the value really should double again so picking a brokerage based on a sign up bonus probably isn’t the most financially sound decision IMO.

Find a good advisor who will do a comprehensive plan. The fees would be similar and you would have a much better outcome. This is one of the most important/life shaping decisions you can have yet you would choose not to use a professional with similar costs.

I’d spend it on hookers and blow

Gold is not an investment. Gold is a commodity like sugar, corn, or wheat. Think of gold as a store of value. When you purchase gold, you are preserving the purchasing power of your money. Gold increases in price during inflationary times because the price goes up with inflation.

I'm not an expert in this stuff, but I think there are a number of concepts getting jumbled up here. So a few thoughts:

1. You can roll an orphaned 401k into an IRA at any time with no penalties - no waiting period needed. You'll want to keep the structure the same (so traditional 401k --> traditional IRA and Roth 401k --> Roth IRA). If you're paying a 1.5% fee on your 401k, you should definitely do this ASAP, as that's eating into your gains significantly even if it seems like a small number.

2. Unless you're just letting it sit there as cash, all IRAs are "investment" accounts. You probably had some sort of default investment in your 401k like a target date fund, so that's why you might not feel like you were "investing," but you were. Likewise, in your new IRA account, you'll want to invest that as well. If you don't want to deal with figuring out individual stocks (which is the right move for most people), you can just pick another mutual fund (I recommend target date index funds if you have them available) to invest it all in.

3. I don't know much about Robinhood, but is there a reason why you're focusing on that one specifically? Robinhood is fine, but my perception is that they focus more on people who want to be active traders. If you're just wanting a place you can move it and forget it, I'd consider one of the traditional brokerages like Vanguard, Schwab, or Fidelity. They have an incentive to get you to move your accounts to them, so they're usually good at helping you with basic advice (not investing advice, but advice on accounts and how to roll things over) if you give them a call.

Talk to a real financial advisor, not someone here or somebody who slept at a Holiday Inn last night. I use Edward Jones and although some people don't like them my guy has done right by me. I'm not going for super high returns just steady, lower risk growth since I'm 62 and that's what they've done for me.

Spend it on a nice fancy $100 lunch

EJ is reasonable at low investment levels because they take their fees out as a percentage of your investments (and I do strongly dislike that they kind of hide this fact). It's not so bad when you're just getting started since, for example, 1.5% of $10k in investments is only $150, which is pretty reasonable. If you stick with them for decades, though, and you've got your life savings with them, that 1.5% is suddenly $15k, which is nuts.

But you're absolutely right that, generally speaking, it's helpful for a lot of people to have "your guy" who you trust to help you work through a lot of the complicated questions like the OP is asking. That has value, even if I personally think there are other, less expensive options once you've got a general plan in place.

Robinhood is a ****ing joke dude. If your money has doubled why move it anyways? Keep your nest egg safe. If you want to start an IRA with a meme trader set aside new monies and take a crack at it but don’t blow your wad right out of the gate.

Robinhood has limited options for investing so you need to have an idea of what you want to invest in prior to any transfer.

First Robinhood is a terrible company. Second the 3% match is only on contributions. I'm not sure they will count the initial rollover as a contribution and you don't mention making contributions, so I'm not sure this helps you.

Because instead of 1.5% annual fee you can invest in an index fund for 0.1% fee.

It says 3% match on all rollover if you sign up for their gold level. 1% match if you use their basic level.

I am just curious if Robinhood is legit. It sounds sketchy at best

Coin Base app obviously.