Also keep in mind if you try and time the market you need to make a correct guess not once but twice. You have to guess when to get out and when to get back in. If you. Can do that with any degree of success you should change professions.

THIS ^^^^

If you put in a thousand a month for 30 years, just the fees on Freedom 2055 will easily cost you over $150,000.

+1
Just regularly deposit money...it will do what is called dollar cost averaging of your shares/, investments....
By attempting to time the market you can miss the biggest ups and the biggest downs...
With 35+ years to go, it more important to get the $$ in and invested than worry about trying to get an extra half a percentage THIS year if you do it right, cause you might miss a bigger gain overall by sitting on a pile of cash at 0.01% in a money market.

Folks who tend to look at they accounts yearly tend to do best at not micromanageing things and do well...just rebalance and adjust for your goals/age or long term outlook...
Few people can ride the ups and downs emotionally of a big day/week/month and not take money out on a good day, then miss the top, or yank it out at the bottom, making a loss real, then miss an increase.

What do you mean? Why would depositing into an Ira cost 150k?

There basically are only two long term investment strategies. If you are an optimist, buy into a respectable Index-500 mutual fund at the least cost possible, which will likely be Vanguard. Just put as much as you can afford into it and don't even look at it until you are within five years of retiring. If the proverbial $hit doesn't hit the fan you are overwhelmingly likely to do better well diversified in the market WITHOUT PAYING ANY BROKERS OR MONEY MANAGERS than you are anyplace else.

If you are a pessimist and really believe there is going to be a societal meltdown capable of taking out the stock market, the logical place to put your money becomes guns, ammo, and freeze dried food.

I've got mine in Vanguard.

Because FreedomFund 2055 charges three-quarters of a percent per year management fees:

https://money.usnews.com/funds/mutua...und/fdeex/fees

Vanguard index 500 would cost you seven-hundreds of a percent.

https://money.usnews.com/funds/mutua...und/vfiax/fees

You are paying Freedom Fund ten times as much to manage your money and you are unlikely to get as good a result.

And if you don't like Vanguard, that's fine, Schwab or any of a number of other index funds have FAR lower expense ratios than Freedom Fund.

https://money.usnews.com/funds/mutua...dex-fund/swppx

You really need to check an Andrew Tobias investment book out of the library and read it on your next long deadhead.

Good answer Excargodog.

Don't just trust us. Prove it for yourself.
https://www.alerusrb.com/calculator/FinCalc3.html

The simplest way is to assume some percentage return and then use the same return minus the fees. I think I used 7% to come up with 150K.

Look at HSA and mega back door Roth IRA too.

Index funds are on the right track, but are often not nearly as diverse as people think they are:

An Easier Way To Invest? - The Investor Blog - Nashville TN Investor Coaching

I'm also 10% in small caps with a Russell 2000 index, but when a guy is paying out 0.75% annually to a fund that is going to underperform the market, I thought the important thing was to get him pointed in the right direction. He has 35 years to tweak it. Right now he just needs to stop giving his money away. That will make a much greater difference in his long term returns than the idea that an index 500 fund isn't diversified enough will. The stats have been run thousands of times since Bogle started pushing passive investments and they are pretty robust.

https://www.ft.com/content/4594f554-...b-4a9c83ffa852

And they've damn sure worked for me.

+2 Opinion: I agree S&P 500 Index fund. Ask Warren Buffett. If you're going to "time the market" I would invest more as the market comes down. The risk is that something worse than has happened in the last 100 years will happen, which is possible. What you don't want to do is invest in the 500, see the market crashing and switching at or near the next bottom. The fact is the people that invest in the stock market as it's falling do better than the folks that try to time the market to buy at the bottom, which is an unknown price point, and sell when they think it's "high" which is an unknown price point. Chances are the S&P 500 will average around 10% for the next 100 years.