I just started a new job, and the 401(k) sucks. No match, 14 funds, all but one of the funds were negative for the last year, and after fees (0.7% on the entire 401(k) plus 0.9% on the specific fund) ALL of the accounts were slightly negative.

It seems like loosing money tax-deferred isn't really a good idea.

Any suggestions on a good mechanism for retirement savings that doesn't require anything from my employer?

I've got a 401(k) from my old job sitting at $150k, and for the next year or so I plan to have about 6k/year to save towards retirement.

Start your own Roth.

At Vanguard.

/Thread

Hypothetically speaking, lets say you have enough money to pay your house off, cause that was your goal, but now you're not so sure you want to do that because you don't really know what is best.

Can you take your money back out of this Roth at any time?  Say I lose my job and want to get rid of the house payment.

A roth is not an appropriate vehicle for those funds, since your funds are not accessible until retirement without penalties. Money market for liquid cash and a brokerage account if you wish to invest in stock. Vanguard and Fidelity have low cost mutal funds and etfs that shoud allow you track with the S&P.

Make sure to keep enough liquid cash to cover in the short to medium timeframe to allow time to unroll investments and get the funds transferred.

Are all roth accounts limited to $5500/year contributions?

Can I get around the limit if I open multiple accounts?

I'm not getting my first paycheck at the new job until Monday, but I may be closer to $9k/year for retirement savings.

I think trying to get around the Roth yearly limit would be viewed as tax evasion.

That said, in your situation the Roth is the best first step (unless you make too much money).

Get someone from Vanguard on the phone.

Roth IRA limit is 5500/person. If you are married your wife can contribute off of your income if she does not have any taxable income. Roth 401K is limited at 18,000.

Yup!

Only advantages to 401K are company matching (or other benefits provided to you for using it), or permitting a higher contribution level ($18k limit/yr instead of $5500).

If neither of those effect your situation, private IRA (roth or traditional based on your situation) and be done with it.

The only reason I've stopped doing Roth's is because I need the income reduction I get from contributing to my 401k.

Would you be able to post your fund choices? I ask because the numbers you are posting don't sound right, even with the crappiest 401k choices.

Looking at returns in a vacuum over the course of a single year is silly.  The DJIA was down 3.5% and the S&P500 was down 2.15% in 2015.  It's entirely logically that most of your 401k funds would also be down over the same period.  The more important question is what those funds were designed to do and how they performed relative to an appropriate index or a peer group of funds with the similar objectives.  

It's important to got to get past the mentality of judging your investments solely based on their absolute performance or else you will never make smart investment decisions.  I'll stick to just that one point since others are chiming in on the other points.

very good point, but talk about some serious correlation though. I wouldn't be surprised if the only thing that wasn't negative for 2015 was the money market fund

Roth IRA contributions are after tax.  You can take your contributions out at any time.  You can not take the returns and dividends out until retirement.  I would use a Roth IRA and put the rest in a normal brokerage account invested in Exchange Traded Funds.

I keep hearing people say that, and it keeps sounding like complete horseshit.

The entire point of an investment is to make money.

If I wanted my money to do nothing, I'd put it in my freezer.
If I wanted my money to be safe, I'd put it in an FDIC insured savings account.
If I wanted my money to show me a nice pair of titties, I'd put it in Gigi's thong at the local stripclub.

An investment has one job: Make me more money. One fucking job, and they failed at it.

Don't get all mad about it, that's how markowitz people feel, they tell you all about keeping fees low and how if you miss the best 10 days in the market, blah blah blah.

It keeps sounding like horseshit because you have no idea what it means.  I can only attempt to explain it to you.  I can't make you understand.  You lost money in a down year, big surprise.  So did most everyone else.  If you can't take the volatility then you should probably stick to one of the other three options that you outlined above.

There is no such thing as an investment that "just makes money" and that's it.  There is no such thing as investing without also accepting risk and experiencing some degree of volatility.  Even money in the freezer has a rate of return and it's typically negative due to inflation.  Even money in an FDIC insured savings account has a slim amount of risk as you still have a counter-party that you are relying on to make you whole if the bank flops.

I guess stripper money is the only safe bet.  You have a 100% chance that you'll go home with less money.  You can't get that kind of certainty from Wall Street!

I never understood why people just don't pull up a chart of an index on yahoo finance and just look at the price action, it gives a good illustration of how mean reversion works.

Save it for 5 years and put it down on rental property.