So, before it is too late here is some basic 401k information.

You most likely know about all of the tax benefits that come with investing your money. The money is taken out of your paycheck before it can be taxed and invested into the plan. But where is it invested into exactly?

With most 401k plans your money is invested into things such as mutual funds, in which you can have professionals manage your money for you. That sounds great until you realize that most of the these mutual funds fail to even match the stock market's average return. It does not come as such a big shock when you consider that most funds are more considered with advertising and keeping their current clients then they are for actually making money for their clients.

This is why if you want to start learning how to invest your own money it can defiantly pay off pretty big. Not all companies will allow you to have a self directed 401k plan, but if your company does it is something to consider. The potential can be a lot greater if you do your research.

Another thing to consider is real estate 401k investing in addition to stocks. Some plans will only let you invest into funds that invest into stocks, but not all. Some plans will even allow you to invest your money into a REIT or a real estate investment trust.

This is a trust that invest into real estate. The company basically takes money invested into it and buy things like apartment buildings, and commercial buildings. Then the profits are split between everyone invested into the plan.

This can help you to diversify your holdings so that you are less dependent on what the stock market does.

For more on 401k plans visit this site on some basic 401k info Free reprint avaialable from: Getting More Information On Your 401k.

The federal retirement calculator can only approximate what will take place. There is no way to definitely foretell the future. However, this useful tool will give you a good guideline by which you can figure what your retirement will be.

This calculator is useful for employers who need to determine certain benefits for their workers such as benefits paid to family members upon the death of the employee or annuities in CSRS, FERS or CSRS-offset retirement.

There are a few things that you should not use this calculator for, including to calculate annuities for employees with intermittent or part-time service, to take into account periods of service that require deposit or redeposit such as some military and temporary time, to calculate TSP benefits, provide estimates for the cost of health benefits or life insurance in retirement, and to calculate benefits for employees who die while employed by the USGS.

What Else Can Help?

Besides the federal retirement calculator there are other retirement planning tools that you can take advantage of as well, including the QuickAnswer retirement calculator which helps assess your progress towards retirement, the standard retirement calculator which tells you how much you should save for retirement, the RRSP accumulator which tells the power of compounded investment returns, post retirement calculator which estimates your retirement income, and the RRIP calculator which helps you to build a productive and successful withdrawal strategy.

A few others that estimate useful information that will help you develop a plan for your retirement are the life expectancy calculator and the annuity calculators.

Retirement is one of the most major and important times in anyone's life, and it is an issue that you should be thinking about early on in your life. The earlier that you can begin to plan and prepare for your retirement the better off you are going to be and whether that means using a federal retirement calculator or other retirement planning tool, the more you can do the better.