Investing

If you’ve maxed your Roth IRA ($7,000 in 2024), you’ve done something only about 15% of eligible Americans manage in any given year. The next question is where extra savings go. Two options dominate: put more into your 401k (up to the $23,000 annual limit), or open a taxable brokerage account and invest there. Neither is automatically correct. The right answer depends on your 401k’s fund quality, when you plan to retire, and whether you might need the money before age 59½. Here’s the decision framework.

A 1% expense ratio sounds small. It’s one penny per dollar. But on a $50,000 investment growing at 8% annually over 30 years, the difference between a 0.05% index fund and a 1% actively managed fund is $137,000 — money that goes to the fund company instead of your retirement account. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a car, a college education, or four years of retirement income. Most 401k participants have never looked up their fund expense ratios. Here’s how to find yours, what a good ratio looks like, and what to do if your plan is charging you too much.

Before 2020, inheriting a parent’s IRA meant you could stretch distributions over your entire lifetime — decades of tax-deferred growth. Congress ended that strategy with the SECURE Act. Now most non-spouse beneficiaries have 10 years to empty the account completely. The problem isn’t the 10-year deadline. It’s that many people take all $250,000 in one year, get pushed into a 32-35% tax bracket on money they’ve never earned, and hand the IRS $70,000 that smart distribution planning could have reduced to $45,000. Here’s exactly how the new rules work and how to structure your withdrawals.

Fidelity’s retirement savings benchmarks say you should have 1x your salary saved by 30, 2x by 35, and 3x by 40. The median American 35-year-old has about $25,000 in retirement savings. That’s a $85,000 gap on a $55,000 salary — and it sounds scarier than it is. Here’s what the benchmarks actually mean, why most people are behind them, and the specific moves that close the gap fastest.

Most people treat their HSA like a medical checking account — money goes in, copays come out. That's leaving serious money on the table. A 38-year-old who contributes $4,150/year to an HSA, invests it in a total market index fund instead of spending it, and pays medical bills out of pocket will accumulate approximately $290,000 in tax-free dollars by age 65 on the exact same medical expenses they would have paid anyway. Here's how the HSA stealth retirement strategy works and when it actually makes sense.

To retire at 65 with $5,000 per month in income, you need roughly $900,000 to $1,500,000 in retirement savings depending on your Social Security benefit. At age 45 with 20 years to retirement, the target balance right now is $250,000 to $500,000 — and the monthly contribution needed to fill any gap depends heavily on what you already have. Here's the exact math for every starting point.

Both an HSA and Roth IRA offer tax-free growth and tax-free withdrawals in retirement. But the HSA has a secret advantage: it's the only triple-tax-advantaged account in existence. For a healthy 35-year-old who can only max one account, here's the case that the HSA almost always wins — with the exact math.

Treasury bills are one of the safest investments available — backed by the U.S. government, state-tax-exempt, and currently paying competitive yields. Here is everything you need to know about how T-bills work and how to buy them.