Q. I'm worried about my daughter's financial future. She's in her early 30s and works for a very small company that does not provide any type of pension plan. She wants to start an IRA with the $2,000 she has saved but isn't sure where to invest the money. Should it be a Roth IRA account? What type of fund will provide the safest long-term growth and allow her to add to it with monthly contributions?

J.W., San Diego

A. With about 30 years until retirement, the adjective ``safest'' should be viewed relatively. Certainly over the short term investments such as bonds and CDs and government securities are immeasurably `safer' that stocks.

But over a long period people who invest ultra-conservatively are likely to find themselves in the unsafe position of having their savings fail to grow adequately. So the discipline for the younger person saving for retirement is to simply ignore the fluctuations of the markets and hop on board.

Fortunately, building a retirement portfolio through an IRA program gives the saver a big advantage. Since the investments will be made on a regular basis -- perhaps monthly, quarterly, or even annually -- over the years the saver will buy into a lot of various markets, buying now when prices are high, then at lower relative prices. This basically represents a conservative discipline called dollar-cost averaging, which reduces the short-term risk for the investor since, in the event of a sour market, the investor's subsequent purchases come at lower prices, and bring the average cost of the entire portfolio lower.

My suggestion for an initial IRA investment is plain vanilla -- a fund that seeks to duplicate the results of the Standard and Poor's 500 index, which represents the common stocks of the nation's 500 largest companies. Two of the best known of these funds are Vanguard Index 500 and Fidelity Spartan Market Index -- both boasting no sales charge and low expense ratios.

The question of whether to go with a Roth IRA is more complex. The big advantages of a Roth are the facts that the accumulation will be tax free when withdrawn in retirement and that there are no mandatory withdrawal schedules. The price of all this is that the saver must contribute after-tax dollars.

As a general rule, investors are best off with a Roth if they believe they will be in a higher tax bracket in retirement than when the money is earned, and a traditional IRA is better for a person in the opposite situation.

But beyond that, my general feeling is this: What's most important in an IRA program is to keep going, to maintain a schedule of saving as much as you can each year, up to the current $2,000 maximum. To me, it is more important to get the maximum number of dollars into the account than to worry about the tax situation 30-odd years hence. Thus if your daughter is in a position that, because of the tax deductibility of traditional IRA contributions, she will be able to save more dollars, the traditional IRA would be the better route. On the other hand, if she can pay the taxes on her earnings and still make that $2,000 maximum annual contribution, that's best of all.

If you have a hard time selling all of this to your daughter, point out to her that if she invests that $2,000 she has saves as a 1997 IRA contribution and then embarks on a schedule of $166 monthly contributions to the IRA, the account would grow to $379,008 after 30 years, presuming 10 percent average annual total returns from her investment.