Offer your insights or judgment on the input financial query or topic using your financial expertise. Reply as normal question answering

What is a good 5-year plan for a college student with $15k in the bank?
First thing to do right now, is to see if there's somewhere equally liquid, equally risk free you can park your cash for higher rate of return. You can do this now, and decide how much to move into less liquid investments on your own pace. When I was in grad school, I opened a Roth IRA. These are fantastic things for young people who want to keep their options open. You can withdraw the contributions without penalty any time. The earnings are tax free on retirement, or for qualified withdrawls after five years. Down payments on a first home qualify for example. As do medical expenses. Or you can leave it for retirement, and you'll not pay any taxes on it. So Roth is pretty flexible, but what might that investment look like? It in depends on your time horizon; five years is pretty short so you probably don't want to be too stock market weighted. Just recognize that safe short term investments are very poorly rewarded right now. However, you can only contribute earnings in the year they are made, up to a 5000 annual maximum. And the deadline for 2010 is gone. So you'll have to move this into an IRA over a number of years, and have the earnings to back it. So in the meanwhile, the obvious advice to pay down your credit card bills & save for emergencies applies. It's also worth looking at health and dental insurance, as college students are among the least likely to have decent insurance. Also keep a good chunk on hand in liquid accounts like savings or checking for emergencies and general poor planning. You don't want to pay bank fees like I once did because I mis-timed a money transfer. It's also great for negotiating when you can pay in cash up front; my car insurance for example, will charge you more for monthly payments than for every six months. Or putting a huge chunk down on a car will pretty much guarantee the best available dealer financing.