Set Up Your IRA ASAP
At this point in the Accelerated Learning Roadmap for Success (ALRS), you’ve learned how to get a better paying job and start advancing your career, as well as how to use checking and savings accounts and a credit card to manage your regular cashflow well. Now, you should open an individual retirement account (IRA) as soon as possible if your employer isn’t already offering you a retirement savings plan. This post turns to NerdWallet with an assist from Ready Aim Retire for guidance on how to do this and some primary things to be aware of:
- Steps to set up an IRA for yourself
- Difference between a Roth IRA and a traditional IRA
- NerdWallet’s shortlist of best IRAs
Steps to set up an IRA for yourself
Here’s the link to the page that guides you through setting up an IRA: How to Open an IRA in 4 Steps - NerdWallet. It’s only four steps, and you should open an account and start saving ASAP for the simple but powerful reason shared in this story from Ready Aim Retire: Identical Twins, Opposite Ends: Why One Retired at 55 and the Other Never Will.. Now, if you’re only 18, or 19, or in your early 20s, just imagine how well you can set yourself up by starting your IRA before 25, let alone 40!
Plus, if you need to take a break from work during your career for any reason, or if you or your spouse wants to stay home with the kids while the other one works, it’s a lot easier to afford that when you have a strong head start on saving for retirement.
Difference between a Roth IRA and a traditional IRA
This topic is a link within the NerdWallet article linked above, but it’s significant enough to be worth calling out separately; here’s a summary of key things you should know to compare Roth and traditional IRAs: Roth vs. Traditional IRA: Which Is Right For You? - NerdWallet.
NerdWallet’s shortlist of best IRAs
The cost of inaction is great when it comes to starting to save for your retirement as soon as possible. So, unless you really want to dive into researching all options and you know you’ll follow through with a decision and open an account promptly, you might be better off taking NerdWallet’s shortlist and running with it to make sure you have an account to put regular funds into soon: Best IRAs: Top Picks for 2026. This list helps you cut to the chase quickly when you don’t have a lot of time or interest in researching – if you take too much time researching and don’t get started, you start missing out on major gains.
Conclusion
Setting up an IRA isn’t difficult with a clear guide that lowers your psychological barrier to action to an easily surmountable level. Use NerdWallet’s guidance to find a good IRA for yourself quickly, take action to set up your account, and arrange for an affordable but meaningful amount of your pay to be automatically transferred into your IRA each month. Then, you can go back about the rest of your life with peace of mind that your retirement saving is off to a great start. Set it up, review it once a year, and otherwise you can forget about it and be pleasantly surprised when, more often than not, the compounding of your account’s value sneaks up on you in a good way!
Set up your IRA ASAP with the simple steps linked above so you can retire sooner!
The next step on the roadmap: Stay tuned for next week’s post!
