My wife’s Roth IRA currently sits at a TD Ameritrade account, where it’s been sitting for the last three or four years. With the majority of it in cash, mostly because we lost track of the account, we want to invest it in our retirement investment of choice, an index fund. Our index fund of choice happens to be the Vanguard 500 Index Fund because most of our retirement funds are with Vanguard. Vanguard does not have the cheapest index fund, I believe that title now resides with Fidelity’s Spartan 500 index. Paying the extra 0.08% seems reasonable considering we can manage it all in one place.

The only downside about this entire process is that TD Ameritrade has a $75 outbound full account transfer fee. Fortunately Vanguard does not charge you to transfer in an IRA (to my knowledge, no one does).

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In the latest issue of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, they rated a dozen discount brokers on a variety of factors including commission, research & tools, fees, investment options, “easy of use,” and customer service. The results were pretty close to the results of Smart Money’s 2008 ranking of the best discount brokers.

Kiplinger’s Best Discount Brokers

1. Fidelity
2. Charles Schwab
3. Muriel Siebert
4. TradeKing
5. E*Trade
6. OptionsHouse
7. TD Ameritrade
8. WellsTrade
9. Firstrade
10. OptionsXpress
11. Zecco
12. Scottrade

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Muriel Siebert was the first woman to hold a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and the namesake behind SieberNet, a discount broker. If you have three minutes, check out this brief profile of her and experiences getting that seat (here’s the full article).

The video is just a little taste of her personality, the article goes much deeper. Also, personal finance proponents will be interested to read that she also developed a personal finance program back in the day. Definitely worth the watch and read though.

The commentator is none other than Mary Pilon, the blogger behind the Wall Street Journal’s The Wallet blog.