If you have a rooted device now, and plan on rooting your device right away before doing anything else... then you could use titanium backup to backup all your apps on to your SD card... then you can move the SD card from one device to another after it's been rooted and reload your apps. Otherwise, just sign into your Google Gmail account and you can download all them again... your paid apps will all still be there and you don't have to pay for them again.
Contacts: the best thing to do with that is just have all your contacts in Gmail... simple, nothing else needs to be done.