Here's where we're at:
-My wife is questioning if the IRA is worth it since she's seen hardly any growth and wants to know if there's a better investment option for her. If I recall, she has a targeted Roth IRA through Vanguard. Should she just stick with the IRA since she has no other retirement investment, or is there another option? If sticking with the IRA, should we go ahead and max out the $6k annual contribution?
Certainly don't have all the answers myself, and certainly not an expert nor a financial advisor), but...
For your wife's IRA, even if you dumped it in right before the big 2020 drop, most indexes have been around the 18-19% growth mark thus far this year, with target funds a little under that....so I'm not sure I understand her 'not enough growth' aspect? Unless she's talking pure dollar amounts, and not percentage?
Getting 'much' more growth would require much more risk exposure or trying to pick a few key 'winners' (and/or needing to have lots of money already invested), so I guess it'd depend on her overall tolerance for seeing potential losses, and/or if you think you can pick a couple key stocks you expect to grow significantly.
Otherwise, one potential thing to note is that with target date funds, you have to be careful of which 'date' is selected - if it's something too soon, a high bond allocation could have dented a lot of the aforementioned growth. (I have some older co-workers who have been in target date funds for a while, but just 'sell' all of their shares of the current date fund, and re-buy into a later target date fund every 3-5 years or so to keep the bond percentage lower without having to do more work)
Some target funds also have relatively high expense ratios for being 'set-and-forget' retirement vehicles, compared to just buying indexes directly.
Depending on your/her age, re-allocating into a more traditional index fund(s) and/or lowering the bond component % (some of those target funds IMO load up on bonds way too early on 'age'-wise) might be a better option than a target date....but that again goes back to risk tolerance, age, how much time you want to spend looking up stuff like RoR, expense ratios, etc... (target dates are pretty set-and-forget) and what your other goals are.
Regardless, if you can afford it, you should (almost) always always always max Roth, as you can't play catch-up, and tax-free growth is a huge deal.
-Should I pay off my student loans, or see about refinancing for a lower interest rate and payment, and invest the extra money?
This is a bit more subjective - IMO it depends on your interest rate(s), if your current loans are federal or private, and the overall loan amount remaining relative to your earnings.
Going private, if you have good/great credit, especially if done multiple times over multiple years, can bring those rates down to mortgage levels to at/under 3% (compared to the current fed rates of 5-6%, or even higher), but you risk loss of federal protections, and thus getting screwed if you have a loss of employment or other emergency. Granted, it sounds like your payment is pretty manageable right now, but even so.
Theoretically, if you could pay the debt off and then start putting that 300 dollars into the market immediately, that's a fairly minimal 'missed opportunity cost'.
At the moment, I'm leaning towards paying off my student loans, maxing out my wife's IRA annual contribution, put some into my daughter's 529, and then put the rest into ETFs, index funds, and the sort. If this is a good route, any suggestions on which ones to consider?
IMO that's certainly not a bad plan.
Among ETFs/mutual funds, Fidelity and Vanguard are both good options with super-low fees (or potentially zero, in Fidelity's case, though the zero-fee funds aren't quite as diverse as their minimal-fee counterparts), though vanguard does require a maintained $3k investment to be consider for it's lowest-cost 'admiral' shares for its mutual funds.
Without getting too deep into the weeds, some combination of small/mid-cap US, large-Cap US (or just a total US market), along with some exposure to international index, +/- REITs, along with some percentage (depending on age) in bonds is about as vanilla as index investing gets in terms of historically getting good gains while diversifying and 'minimizing' individual stock fluctuation/risk.
I totally agree, but... I can literally sell my company stock one day after it's purchased. I wouldn't be exposing myself to any fluctuations of company stock at all, since i'd only own it for a single day. This is with Fidelity, so I'll definitely check what the fees associated with it are, but it can't be more than 15%?
Depending on your company's plan (i.e. whether it's included in the 401k or is a separate option), you'd potentially take a short-term tax rate hit, so that would also eat into any profits, but...yeah, it seems like it primarily depends on potential hidden fees or other 'gotcha' aspects.
