New IRA Changes Make It a Great Time to Open an Absolutely No-fee IRA At Firstrade

As financial consumers, we face many choices on how to invest our hard-earned money for retirement. But save we must. Firstrade’s absolutely no-fee IRA allows all of your funds to work for your retirement only with maximum tax advantage.

Studies have shown that one-in-five Americans have no retirement savings at all, while one-in-three who are close to retirement age have less than $25,000 saved. Given that many of us will likely live longer than past generations, this is pretty scary stuff.

Are you prepared to live comfortably in your retirement?

IRAs are among the most well-known and popular retirement investment products available to consumers today. With a range of choices from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA, millions of Americans are saving for their future by opening IRA accounts.

And now, new reforms are making it easier and more appealing for Americans to invest and save for retirement. The two key changes:

• Increased Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) Ages – Previously, with a traditional IRA, an account owner would have had to begin taking required minimum distributions (RMDs), the minimum amount you must withdraw from your account each year,  when reaching age 70½. This age has now been raised to 72, providing more time to save with tax deferral.

• Removes Age Limitations on Contributions – Formerly capped at age 70½, maximum age limits on retirement contributions have been eliminated allowing investors to continue to contribute to an IRA throughout their lifetime and save even more.

Of course, the existing benefits to an IRA still apply— for a traditional IRA, for instance, your money grows tax-deferred and your contributions may be tax-deductible. And you can contribute up to $6,000 a year or $7,000 if you’re age 50 or older. With a Roth IRA, you pay taxes when you put your money into your account. The contributions and earnings including capital gains, dividends and interest income are considered after-tax money, so when you withdraw the money years from now, you won't have to pay federal income tax on it.

IRAs are great vehicles for you to sock away money for your retirement years! At Firstrade, we make it easy to open an absolutely no-fee IRA. That’s right. No annual fee, account set-up fee, or maintenance fee. And, you can trade stocks, ETFs, options and mutual funds in your IRA with zero commission trading.

Check here for more detailed information about the benefits of IRAs and to open an account!

News About Firstrade’s CMA Foreign Fransaction Fees

As we discussed in an earlier blog post about Cash Management Account, owning a Firstrade cash management account (CMA) is a convenient way to manage your money by providing all the benefits of a checking, savings and investment account within one product.

A Firstrade CMA has no annual, application or maintenance fees and only a minimum deposit of $100 is needed to get started.

And, we’ve just made our CMA even more beneficial. Here’s how it works:

• To be eligible, you must maintain a minimum account equity of $10,000 or more in your CMA.

• You will receive a refund for the first foreign transaction fee (3%)incurred each month on debit card withdrawals and purchases made outside of the U.S.

• The reimbursement will appear in your account within three business days.

This is definitely great news for those of you who live or spend time overseas. To learn more about our cash management accounts, go here.

New Investor Site Goes Live!

What do customers want in an investor site? Simple, really.

Ease of Use. Accessibility. Simple navigation. Speed. Information.

Well, we’ve got it all covered with the new site that we’re launching today.

You’ve asked for the tools to make your investing experience better than ever and we’re continuing to deliver for you.

Highlights include:

• New and Updated Look - Redesigned to bring a fresh new look to our award-winning investing platform.

• Improved Navigation - New dropdown navigation bar makes it quicker to find what you need. 

• Faster Performance - Optimized for faster loading times and performance across the site.

Take a look and let us know what you think!

Firstrade Receives Accolades From Kiplinger’s, NerdWallet, and Stockbrokers.com!

OK, we’ll admit it. We’re human. We like to hear good things about us. Especially from prestigious and influential organizations covering our industry on a daily basis, such as Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, Stockbrokers.com and Nerdwallet.

But what’s most important is that these honors reflect the value and high-quality services our customers have come to expect from Firstrade.

Here’s a quick rundown:

• Firstrade was ranked as a best broker for active traders, the number one brokerage for ETFs and for best commissions and fees by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Best Online Brokers of 2019.

• NerdWallet gave five stars to Firstrade, citing us as the best online broker for beginners, stock trading, IRAs and Roth IRAs, options and day trading.

• Firstrade was awarded 5 stars for ease of use and 4.5 stars for commissions and fees by Stockbrokers.com.

We’re proud to provide our customers with the best trading tools, no commission trading and advanced research to help them make informed decisions and trade easier.  We strive every day to improve the customer experience at Firstrade. 

Stay tuned for more exciting news in 2020.

Why Infrastructure Upgrades Improve Your Trading Experience

Ok, so infrastructure is not the sexiest of topics. But guess what? Our society and economy could not survive without infrastructure in place. This of course includes the global financial system as well.

Here’s a good definition we found from Market Business News: “Infrastructure refers to the basic systems and services that a country or organization needs in order to function properly. For a whole nation, it includes all the physical systems such as the road and railway networks, utilities, sewage, water, telephone lines and cell towers, air control towers, bridges, etc., plus services including law enforcement, emergency services, healthcare, financial services, education, etc.”

Now you know, but what does this have to do with investing at Firstrade you ask? Well, simply put, as a self-directed investment firm, we continually need to upgrade our infrastructure and IT systems to keep providing you with the best possible tools and resources to enhance your trading experience today and for the future. That’s why in the past year alone, we have doubled our investment in the core infrastructure.

Here’s what we’ve just done:

• Completed a comprehensive infrastructure and technology upgrade of all our trading platforms and security systems. This initiative was undertaken to provide the best possible trading experience for our customers to maximize speed, execution and security.

• The initial phase of the enterprise infrastructure project has been completed with the latest multi-core processors and a high-performance network storage system that’s based on 3D-NAND flash technology. 

• The new platform can perform up to three times faster than Firstrade’s previous version, delivering up to 300,000 I/O per second. This upgrade in speed can make the critical difference in whether a trade is successful or not and can help achieve real cost savings as well.

• We’re testing multi-cloud system architecture to provide increased availability of the best cloud services.

Firstrade has long recognized that the speed and pace of trading in today’s financial markets have required the company to be consistently ahead of the curve in developing and providing leading-edge technologies. Our recent growth has been coupled with the significant investment we’ve made in technology.

We’re proud to be leading the way of our industry, but we’ll never rest on our laurels—more good news to come!