Long Term Investing & Retirement: The second best time is now

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Long Term Investing & Retirement: The second best time is now

piratepilates: Mar 28, 2004; So I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it.

I am a high earner and I have no idea if it's a good idea for me to backdoor a Roth IRA, should I?

I'm a software engineer, my income blows past the regular Roth IRA limits. I have a 401k with employer matching (which I'm opting in for hard), along with a significant amount of my income coming as an annual bonus and even more as an RSU.

I have no idea if I'm going to have higher taxes when I retire? I'm hoping to not work much when I'm retired, would be much nicer chilling on a beach, but how do I determine what my taxes would likely be?

An additional wrinkle is that I'm currently working on TN status, so I'm not a citizen of America (yet?), I also have no idea what country I will retire in (although likely either Canada or America [if those are still around in 30 years]) -- which reminds me I have an HSA that I could also contribute more to, but how does that work if I retire in Canada? etc.

Is a backdoor Roth still a good option for me? So far I've been putting my RSU money in to a brokerage holding index ETFs, but I get the feeling I'd want to move as much of that to a tax-free situation like a Roth instead?

# ¿ Apr 10, 2024 19:16

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# ¿ May 5, 2024 12:35

piratepilates: Mar 28, 2004; So I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it.

Leperflesh posted:

Anecdotally, a lot of people contribute to a 401k to get an employer match, and then that's all. If they have some more, they might put more into their 401k or they might do an IRA or they might do both.

I think people on the lower income range who have access to an employer sponsored retirement plan tend to either not participate at all, or participate at a very low level (like $50 a month) because they are very sensitive to their paycheck, and they can see the difference on the check from that withholding.

Lots of people have no idea that they have an IRA option, and invest in their employer-sponsored plan because someone at work presented it to them. Lots of people come into this thread and are confused about what a "roth" is - they think that word is synonymous with "ira" and so they'll say "my 401k and my roth" or similar jumbled things. Generally I think a huge swathe of americans are confused and that affects their behavior mostly into nonparticipation or minimal participation.

High earners who have good advice pile everything they can into tax advantaged accounts, and that speaks to how they are almost always advantageous. I've never heard of someone voluntarily not putting money into tax advantaged space that they completely understand, specifically because they have calculated that they'll pay less tax on that money in aggregate at the end. Maybe that's this edge case we're talking about and it turns up, but it's such a novel statement to me that I'm sort of reflexively super skeptical of it.

This is anecdotally so I'd love to see hard numbers.

It's incredibly hard not to be, after living here for almost 2 years, there's such a staggering amount of bizareness and weird bureaucracy and odd terms and loopholes you go through. Nothing here is made easy.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 17:27

piratepilates: Mar 28, 2004; So I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it.

I just realized I have about 5.84% of my taxable portfolio in SGOV, and it's money I don't need in the short term (like, more than a decade) at all. Would it be better for me to sell it and buy different ETFs with it?

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 21:01

piratepilates: Mar 28, 2004; So I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it.

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

ETF just means exchange traded fund - it doesn't imply anything about the actual underlying securities and their risk profiles. So it's very hard to tell you if you should buy "a different ETF" - it depends on what that ETF actually is, and how well it aligns with your money goals. SGOV sounds like it doesn't align with your goals for this money so I think it's a good idea for you to sell and invest in something else - but to determine the "something else" you need to figure out what your goals actually are and when you will need the money.

You could buy an ETF that only invested in companies that start with the letter A. You could buy an ETF that invested in nothing but junk grade corporate paper. You could buy an ETF run by Cathie Wood. You could buy an ETF that tracks the performance of the Nikkei 225. All of these would meet different goals (comedy, income stream at high risk, bagholding, you really like Japan).

All in on DJT, got it :thumbsup:

Meant more of sell SGOV and put it in to a general IVV/ITOT/IEMG/QQQ/SCHD kind of deal, general wider market ETFs with the goal of growing over decades.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 21:21

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Long Term Investing & Retirement: The second best time is now