1. Make a will
2. Pay off your credit cards first.
3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support
4. Fund your 401k to the maximum
5. Fund your IRA to the maximum
6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it
7. Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account
8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in an index stock
fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never
touch it until retirement
9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on
(retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial
planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio
I'd look at this list and add
4+5a Alternate between an IRA and a Roth IRA (or similarly, a 401k and
a Roth 401k), to diversify risk (Roth is better, but the government
could easily change the rules and strip existing Roth IRAs of their
tax advantage)
8a. The funds should be with reliable brokers. A non-index stock fund
can be appropriate if the strategy is a clear long-term winner and the
manager is good. Many people don't have the expertise to figure out if
the latter sentence is the case.
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