I feel like such an adult right now.

So today I met with our company’s representative that deals with all of our insurance and pension plans. I’ve been with the company for over a year now and I wanted to take advantage of the SEP plan that is offered. This is my first time dealing with creating a pension for myself, my first step towards planning for retirement or at least getting money invested into my long term future.

Because the company I work for is fairly small at least personnel wise, the investment opportunities are a little different when compared to conventional 401k. I’m actually investing in a 408K SEP IRA which deals with mutual funds and the value or growth of the overall market(s) of my choosing. All of this is done through ING which is sexy all in itself, I say this because not only is it all beyond easy to manage but I know that my investment is in good hands.

The plus side of this is long term and I’m talking very long time the payoff from an IRA is amazing. Short term however, like if I wanted to cash in and buy a house or something it may not be worth it, so it’s definitely designed for retirement. But, it’s still real money that belongs to me. So if I were to apply to get a loan to buy a home down the road, the more personal assets I can show the better.

So for now I’m making fairly minimal contributions to this thing, I’m trying to achieve a number for short term goals and although I don’t want to think an investment into myself is a bill I don’t want to spend money that I don’t have either. If I could do this without noticing it, perhaps by slowly increasing it I think it would work out pretty well. I had to essentially select what kinds of markets I wanted to invest in and again for now I went with somewhat stable or long term high cap growth funds. In the future I might change to something more volatile with hopes to make my somewhat small investment into something big. With the way our country’s budget and social security system has been nearly completely trashed over the past 8 years… God knows I’ll need it because I’d prefer to retire before I’m too old to enjoy it.