Playing the retirement catch up game

[searles]

In February I finally reached the milestone of becoming debt free. However, at 35 I find myself with only $15K of retirement savings in a Traditional Rollover IRA through Vanguard(Target Fund). I make an average salary of $52K a year before any overtime and the company I work for offers a 401K. The crap part is they don't match a cent and use Guardian as a provider who mostly offers funds with high fees. Seems the most reasonable option I think I could invest in with Guardian is an S&P fund through State Street with an expense ratio of 0.96%.

Since becoming debt free I decided the next step of action I should take would be to start saving cash in order to open and fund a Roth IRA with Vanguard(I already have an EF set aside). The plan was to buy into VTSMX but if I wanted to do that I would need to save $3K first in order to buy in. I've got the $3K saved plus some but I've just been sitting back and watching market wondering if now is the right time to jump in or if I should hold off a bit and wait for a drop?

Aside from opening and fully funding a Roth IRA I'm not sure what would be my next best course of action? Should I bother with the 401K that my company offers seeing there is no match? Should I just take the extra cash I have after funding the Roth and open a taxable account instead of the 401K? Or should I do both? Open a 401K at work and also open a taxable account? If I was to open a 401K I would probably invest between 10-15%. Thoughts are appreciated

[Retired To Win]

A few things.

First, if you save 50% of your take home pay, you can retire in 15 years.

Second, fund first a tax-deferred account.  If you don't like your employer's 401k, open a traditional IRA somewhere.  Lots of people like Vanguard for that.

Third, before you do that second thing, open a savings account and build up an emergency reserve fund.  Get it up to at least 6 months worth of your BASIC expenses -- not counting vacations, gifts, eating out, etc.  Even better would be one year's worth of expenses (which is what I have done).

Good luck.

[FranzJoseph]

Good job getting out of debt!  My wife also has her 401k with Guardian (with a paltry 1% company match) and there are a few low cost index funds I was able to pick for her.  Janus and SSgA are two decent ones.  Without knowing your monthly expenses and how much you can save I'm only able to throw out standard advice - max out the 401k AND traditional IRA before you open a taxable account.  You can contribute to both a trad and ROTH BUT not beyond the max contribution limit (if it's $5,500 then you can only contribute $4,000 to Trad and $1,500 to ROTH for example).  The plus for contributing pre-tax money into the 401k and IRA is that it lowers your AGI and therefore, your taxes, which can be huge especially if you drop into the next lower tax bracket. 

Do you have an HSA available through work?  That is another excellent tax reduction option and, if invested, can generate interest for your medical expenses.  For example, my HSA should have about 100k in it when we semi-retire hopefully producing 5k a year in interest which is close to our annual deductible.

Have you considered looking for a higher paying or better 401k job?