Matt Barrow wrote:

My wife is the financial type in our family (16 years with Merrill-Lynch
before she "retired" to run our business), but she would probably recommend
minimizing your 401K contribution and go with an investment account (NOT
with one of the big brokerage firms) on your own. That's what we did, when I
got laid off in 1997 -- she rolled our account into a separate/private
account, mainly tied to index funds and some growth funds. Our returns since
have been very good and we "missed" the dot.com collapse in 2000.

Hopefully, she wouldn't recommend minimizing (whatever that means) his
401K. She should recommend that he contribute to the 401K only enough
to capture the full employer match and then turn to a Roth IRA and max
that out before looking at other alternatives.

Matt