I sat down this afternoon with the intent to buckle down and finally look into transferring my old company’s 401k into a Roth IRA. I had been putting it off because based on what I’ve heard about other people’s experiences in general, I thought the process would be frustrating, time-consuming and paper-work intense.

My impressions were wrong.

It took me about 30 minutes to both setup a new Roth IRA account and request a distribution of my old company’s vested 401k balance to put into that Roth IRA. Piece of cake!

I mentioned in my 2008 goals that I would be investing through Vanguard, so the work of researching who to invest through and what to invest in was already done. I set up an account via Vanguard’s website in a matter of minutes in a very straight-forward, easy process.

I thought the harder part of the process would be getting my money from my current 401k provider. It took a while to navigate through the site to find where to get a distribution, but after I did, it was very easy to submit a request.

My new company’s 401k matching doesn’t start until I’ve been there for a year and I did not want to lose a year’s worth of compounding. Now I’ll be able to set up automatic monthly transfers from my bank account and won’t lose a step. An added bonus is that when my new company’s 401k matching does begins, they also use Vanguard as a provider, so I’ll be familiar with the company and the website. This will also make it easy to contribute a full 15% towards retirement - 8% through the company matching plan and the remaining 7% into the Roth IRA.

Now I can mark this off my to-do list! If you have 401ks from past employment hanging out there, look into rolling them into a Roth IRA. It’s probably easier than you think!