Start listening to this guy. He really gets it. He has a weekly show on Sunday that's available as a podcast on Monday. About an hour and a half each week. Subscribe to the podcast and listen while you're commuting or on an extended Airport Appreciation Tour.
The Ric Edelman Show - The Truth About Money Radio
Read this book. It's written by Jack Bogle, founder of Vanguard. Easy read, you can get through it in a couple of nights.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/047...FFCF7055BGGR6T
Dave Ramsey is fine for getting out of debt motivation, but as far as investment advice he's pretty terrible.
Investment planning isn't hard. No need to pay someone what you can easily do yourself.
Not all 401k's suck. Some are actually pretty damn good. I thought our 401k was fairly mediocre, until I discovered that one can buy individual funds and ETF's not included in the plan.
And while a great many plans are indeed mediocre to terrible, they ALL should have at the very least an S&P 500 type fund with a low expense ratio. The funds in the Spirit 401k I wasn't impressed with, but we DID have the Vanguard S&P 500 fund for a ridiculously cheap expense ratio of .04%. That's about as cheap as it gets. I was simply dumping ALL of my 401k contributions into that one fund, balancing out my portfolio in my other IRA's.
So unless your 401k really really REALLY sucks, you should be able to find one or two funds that are okay.