No, you don’t need to take it out of your retirement account to put it into a CD. Under the IRA designation, you can buy any index fund, mutual fund, CD, or stock or bond. Our retirement money is in CDs. It’s an IRA invested in a CD.
If the bank/brokerage holding your IRA does not offer the product you want, you transfer your retirement money to another institution. Probably USAA offers IRAs, and IRA CDs. You just have to ask. If they don’t, you can set up and transfer to Vanguard or other brokerage. What I like about Vanguard is that I can buy stocks in my retirement account.
When my husband and I worked at companies which gave us only 5 retirement options, we would put our retirement funds into their company-designated firm’s money market account. Then we made quarterly transfers from the company firms accounts into Vanguard brokerage, and then could do online trades into index funds, mutual funds, stocks, whatever.
There is no tax fee when you transfer.
You don’t need to use Vanguard. There are many brokerage firms. They help you with filling out the transfer forms.
I wish I knew where I could make a better investment than a CD, but since I do not know, I am in the CD for now. I plan to buy gold, silver, commodities index fund, Asian index fund, bond futures, but while I am checking this all out, I am in the CD. I’m not decided yet in my direction. In the meantime, while I am learning and deciding, I wanted to get out of the stock market, because I think it will correct. This is my strategy, and I hope more people will share their thinking and strategy so we can all learn from each other.
