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With the recent struggles in the stock market a fairly frequent question I get is should I start putting more money into my 401k or lower the contributions?

Personally, I started putting more money away in both my 401k and IRAs as I am investing in good quality mutual funds and they are currently at a discounted price.

People tend to follow the crowd, here is the basic mentality of the individual investor right now. Economy is bad, inflation is rising, stuff cost more, I should not invest as much.

Now I ask myself what should I do?  Go 100% against what the crowd is doing! I have doubled my contributions in recent months and will continue packing away as much as I can into my retirement accounts.  It is bargain time.

If you read my other personal finance articles, you will see additional investment advice of mine.  What are your thoughts?

One common question I get is about Mutual Funds, should you really own them? Should you invest only in stocks and not pay the mutual fun fees? Maybe you should just keep your money in a savings account?

My fiancee before we met would just as soon park her money in a savings account and leave it earn .5%. She was happy her money was safe and secure and she could withdraw it at anytime.

After we dated for a while and I was comfortable giving advice to her I explained to her how inflation was making her actually lose money.

To make matters worse her 401k from work was actually investing in a money market fund paying 1%.

Taking it one step at a time we got the 401k money out of the money market and into Dodge and Cox Stock Fund, HSBC International Fund and Vanguard Index 500 (I know not the best funds going but we had limited choices), although I do currently like Dodge and Cox which recent reopened to new investors and is at a fairly low price per share. This money was not moved in one shot. We moved a little at a time as she became more and more comfortable.

Then we worked on opening up a Roth IRA. For this selection we chose Fairholme, which has a solid track record and should be a good selection.

Next for her emergency fund we got out of the .5% savings account and into an Ing Direct Savings account which paid just a little over 3%.

This has been quite a financial transformation and it still is a work in progress.

If you are interested in individual stocks I will be posting more about stocks I current like, similar to what I did with Harley Davidson stock (HOG).