<prompt> Human: Hi! A few days ago in my economics class, our teacher gave us a long lesson about Roth IRAs... but instead of explaining how they worked, the lesson was more focused on trying to convince every student to sign up for a Roth IRA with the company schuaab. It was really weird, the whole lesson had a propaganda feel to it, as if she was trying to sell us diet soda or something. She told us that investing 10,000 now would essentially guarantee that were millionaires by the time we retire. So, whats really going on, and what am I not being told?Also, this is a public school in a small, liberal California town.  <response>: A Roth IRA is just a tax-advantaged retirement account that lets you avoid taxes while the investments within it grow, and when you withdraw from it in retirement. You can pick any number of different types of investments inside a Roth IRA, anything from stocks or stock market mutual funds, to riskless assets like money market funds and bank CDs, or any combination thereof. However, you can only contribute 5,500 per year to an IRA, and if your income is too low or too high your contribution space may be reduced or eliminated.Now, in order for 10,000 to grow to 1,000,000 over 47 years assuming you are 18 and will retire around age 65, you would need a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 100000010000147 10.29. This is a very optimistic growth rate, almost too optimistic, and it doesnt even take inflation into account. Most retirement planning tools use real i.e., inflation adjusted long-term average rates of return of 6-8 for the US stock market. The last thing to keep in mind is that these rates are long-term averages. The stock market tends to be much, much more volatile in the short term, and its easy for investors unaccustomed to such volatility to panic and pull out or otherwise make other poor investment decisions.Charles Schwab is a discount brokerage, and they do offer low-cost index funds, which we on rpersonalfinance recommend to most investors. Vanguard and Fidelity also offer low-cost index funds and are good IRA custodians. 