I don't have a 401K but I have 10,000. what should I do with it so I will have some money when i retire?

1st, you've stated that you have a mid-to-long term goal of 15 years. So, second, you need to ask yourself what risk your comfortable with. Can you handle loosing half of what you put in one day with the potential for making it back the next or do you want to be guaranteed that every penny put in DEFINITELY remains? The first is more options and futures while the latter is more your savings account. I'll assume somewhere between.

Overall, I'd suggest a mutual fund of some sort. Basically, it is a fund that invests in multiple different stocks, diversifying your investment and, therefore, your risk if one specific company/category does poorly. Given your 15-year outlook, I'd suggest one with both Growth and Income. Funds are rated in different categories like Growth, Income, Growth and Income, etc. Growth means that the price of the fund invests in companies that are likely to rise in stock price so you can buy low and sell high. Income means that the fund invests in companies that often give dividends to their shareholders (dividends are portions of the profit the company earns that year and are usually paid quarterly). If you get dividends, ensure that you are signed up for a direct reinvestment plan so that all dividends received will be directly reinvested to buy more shares of that fund and immediately start earning you more money. Note that you usually have to pay taxes on dividends in the year that they are earned. Overall, dividends will help your money grow faster as it adds to the baseline of the pot (read up on compounding). If you look solely at growth, it could go up and up for 14 years and 11 months but tank the day before you withdraw. I'm not saying dividends can completely compensate for this but it does add more money into the pot to allow it to compound and work for you over the course of the 15 years. If you really want, you could just have the dividends deposited to a cash account and keep them out of the mix but your earning potential drops.

I would suggest you look at low-load and no-load funds like those found at Vanguard (www.vanguard.com). With 10K starting, you'll (likely) meet the minimum balance required to not incur any basic fee and, as the name suggests, transaction fees are low (in comparison to large brokerages). While these companies typically don't provide stock advice, they are required by law to provide how their funds have performed over various time frames. Look at not only the 1 year but, the 5 year and lifetime performance to get a better gauge of how well the fund manager handles changing times.

You can look into investing directly into the DOW Jones index (it has shares of all of the "blue chip" companies that make up the Dow index) or the S&P index. Another option is that these low/no-load firms often put together retirement funds for each decade. So, say you invest in the 2020 retirement fund. The fund manager will automatically invest the fund in more risky stock/bonds now (earning more $) and, as 2020 nears, switch the fund to less risky items to ensure the money is there as it comes time for you to need it. Which brings me to my next point, if you don't invest in this type of fund, you should consider doing this yourself. Invest moderate-to-high risk now and, in 5 years, go to moderate, and in 5 more, reduce to low-moderate.

Another option to look into is the investment into an Individual Retirement Account (IRA) (see www.ira.com for details). You should talk to an accountant and/or read the tax docs for your specific situation but the two your most likely to consider are a Roth IRA and a Traditional IRA. But note that the government only allows so much to be invested into your IRA account each year - income dependent. So, some into IRA, rest into normal for now and feed into IRA from standard account over the next few years (you're typically allowed 3K+ into an IRA each year). With a Roth IRA, you pay taxes now at your current tax rate but draw out the money tax free. With a Traditional, the money you invest today is deducted from your total income you pay taxes on today but you pay taxes at whatever your income bracket is when you withdraw. So, the simple way of looking at it is that if you expect to have a higher income level at retirement, pay the cheaper taxes now and invest in a Roth. If you expect a very modest retirement income, then a traditional is better. Again, seek accountant advice or read tax laws for what's most applicable to you. Oh, note that you pay a penalty if you withdraw from either account before retirement time unless for some very specific instances and, you MUST withdraw your money by a certain retirement age. Depending on your age now, this may not make it worth your while, but consider it.

Most IRA accounts allow you to choose a broad range of funds to apply within the IRA so you can still do the approaches I spoke of before as you do not get penalized if the fund manager tinkers with the stock holdings in the fund and you don't get penalties if you withdraw from a fund in an IRA and immediately reinvest in a same-family type of fund (still as part of the IRA account). Again, talk to accountant / read no-/low-load brokerage firm's rules about what exactly it means to do this and what the firm's limitations are on reinvestments in IRAs before investing.