When starting a new job or becoming eligible for your employer’s retirement plan, it can be tempting to delay enrollment because the process and decisions associated with enrollment may be overwhelming. However, putting off enrollment can impact your future. We have a few tips to help reduce the stress:

• Decision 1: How much to contribute? If your company offers a match, try to contribute enough to maximize it. Otherwise, contribute what you can, and increase periodically.
• Decision 2: Roth or Pre-Tax? Pre-tax reduces your income tax obligations today. Roth will not reduce today’s income taxes but offers tax-free investment earnings if IRS conditions are met.
• Decision 3: How to invest? A target date fund (the date closely aligns with when you may expect to retire) may be an easy way to invest; their risk profile is based on the timeline to the target date. You can update your investments later if you’d like.
• Easy solutions: Your plan may offer automatic enrollment or “easy enroll” prompts to simplify the enrollment process.

Educational use only. Using asset allocation as part of your investment strategy neither assures nor guarantees better performance and cannot protect against loss of principal due to changing market conditions.