In this article, Contango Capital Advisors explores the benefits and pitfalls of Roth IRAs and why you might want to take a fresh look at them. All of you have heard of Roth IRAs, but most of you have not paid too much attention to them because they have had income limitations that have made them irrelevant to all income categories.

However, in 2005 Congress passed an amendment to the rules that will expand Roth IRA opportunities to everyone regardless of their wealth, beginning in 2010.

It’s good to know what your family goals are for the next 10 or 20 years: Buy a home, send children to college, accumulate enough for retirement and many other worthy aims. But good intentions don’t necessarily make good outcomes. To be successful, you need to do some simple arithmetic, and then — and this is the hard part — live according to the calculations.

Many families have discovered that the assets they intended to use for important purposes — paying for the children’s college educations, funding retirement, buying a long-awaited vacation home — have been swallowed up by the financial crisis. They’re now having to make last-minute and often drastic adjustments to their plans.

Market risk is a chance that an investor takes. No matter what the long-term prospects of an investment or its probable intrinsic value, an asset may trade at any price in the market. A trading price is determined by the interactions of buyers and sellers. If there is more buying than selling of an asset, its price will rise; if there is more selling than buying, its price will fall. This means that an investment’s price can rise, fall and bounce around. The extent of these movements is usually described by the term volatility.

It turns out that this Internet thing is good for more than just sending emails, investing, and viewing weird home videos. And we know that we need to do better at using it to communicate with you.

Armed with that knowledge, we are starting a blog. Those of you in the know understand what a blog is—or at least you have an idea of a few out there—see the value in creating a communication tool where we can talk to you and you can talk to us. But to those who do not know, we’ll explain what it means for Zions and what our purpose will be.