Planning for the future is super important. Nobody wants to still be working when they are 70 years old, and no one wants to have to depend on their children to take care of them financially.

We have many different retirement accounts and funds to plan for retirement, and I'd like to talk about 2 very popular ones, the IRA and the 401K.

Most all employers offer a 401K fund as part of their package of benefits. They will also often offer incentives for you to contribute to that fund. One popular way of doing that is to match every dollar you contribute for so many years or to a certain total per year. They do this for a couple reasons.

The employer has to have so many dollars on hand for everything in each employee's benefit package. So by offering to match your contributions, they are encouraging you to invest in the 401k fund, and they thus get more on hand dollars to invest and to claim.

Too, they will usually take the funds and invest in either in-house business or market funds. This generates earnings from the money you the worker has contributed. So when you retire they get to pay you back with mostly your money or the earnings from your own money.

IRA stands for Individual Retirement Account. The purpose of these accounts is to make people want to invest in their retirement to kind of take it easy on the social security system. Too many people rely on their 401K and then their company goes under. Then they are left eith no retirement.

Since their are so many types of IRA's, it may be difficult to decide which is the best for your plan. Discuss your retirement goals with a financial advisor and they can help you see which is the right one.