The Truth About Borrowing Against Your 401k

Sometimes, when you put all of your effort into saving for retirement, you get to a point where you need a bit of extra money. Maybe your children's tuition payments are due. Maybe you have medical bills that need to be paid. Or maybe you're planning to buy a home of your own and you need to come up with money for the down payment. So you start wondering where the money is going to come from. And you start to think about borrowing against your 401k.

There are some advantages to borrowing against your 401k. Typically, you will be able to get the money that you need quickly. There isn't a lengthy approval process because the money that you will be borrowing is -ultimately -your own.

Further, when you are borrowing against your 401k, you are not actually withdrawing the money from the account, and therefore you will not have to pay the 10 percent penalty -though you will have to pay back the money that you borrow with interest.

Of course, just as borrowing against your 401k has advantages, it also has disadvantages. Because you have borrowed the money from your 401k, it is no longer in the account and therefore no longer earning interest. Also, because your 401k account is controlled by your employer, typically the money that you borrow from your 401k will be paid back in deductions from your paycheck.

Therefore it is important to consider that borrowing from your 401k will affect your income -both now and after you've retired. And there is one other thing that you should consider before borrowing from your 401k -what would happen if you were to leave your job.

If you leave your job -whether it's because you've found something better or the company has chosen to downsize -you are responsible for paying back all of the money you have borrowed from your 401k. If you can't, then you will be responsible for paying the taxes and the 10 percent early withdrawal penalty for removing money from your 401k account.

Because of the disadvantages of borrowing from your 401k, you need to make the decision very carefully. You should take the time to take a closer look at all of your savings and investments before you borrow against the account.

One way to get a closer look at all of your retirement accounts when you need to come up with some extra money is to download our free retirement calculator. With this retirement calculator, you'll be able to evaluate the way all of your retirement savings accounts -as well as the stocks, bonds and mutual funds in which you've invested -to see how they have performed over time.

Further, you will be able to get projections about how your savings and investments will perform over the next 25 years. Those projections will take into consideration changing interest rates and the effects of inflation on your retirement savings.

But even more importantly, you'll be able to take a look at the way changes that you make to your savings and investment strategies will affect the income that you have when you retire. These changes may be investing in different stocks or mutual funds. These changes might also be withdrawals from your retirement savings.

If you have any questions after you've used our retirement calculator, you'll be able to get answers: when you download our free retirement calculator you will also be contacted for a free one-on-one consultation with a financial advisor. You'll be able to ask about borrowing against your 401k and whether or not it is the best idea for you.

You'll be able to develop a plan for getting the money that you need and you'll be able to make sure that your retirement savings will still provide you the income that you need when you retire.

If you're thinking about borrowing against your 401k, you owe it to yourself to make sure that you are making the right decision. Understand borrowing from your retirement savings and the way that it will affect the income you have once you no longer have a steady paycheck. Click the red button below to download our free retirement calculator and get the information that you need to make an informed decision.