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401K Explained in தமிழ் (US Retirement Series – 1)

This episode and next few episodes are going to be US specific episodes. All these US specific episodes will have US flag in their thumbnails. Indian audience, feel free to skip these episodes and save your time. US folks, there are 2 main retirement plans in USA. 1. 401K and 2. IRA. We will cover more in detail about IRA in another episode. In this episode, we will cover 401K in detail. Hi. My name is Vijay Mohan. You are watching – Investment Insights. 401K is a retirement plan offered thru employer.

We will not be able to open a 401K account just by ourself like a brokerage account. We can contribute to a 401K, only if it is offered through our employer. Almost all employers offer 401K plan. Very few small companies do not offer 401K. How much can we contribute to a 401K? Each employee can save up to $20,500 per year. If husband and wife both are working, both can contribute $20,500 each. People older than 50 can contribute more – $27,000/year. That is called as "Catch up contribution". Other than our contribution to 401K, many employers match up our contribution up to certain percentage. Let's say that an employer is matching up to 7%. If our salary is $100K, 7% of that would be $7,000. Let's say that we are contributing $20,500 to our 401k and maxing it out. Employer would have matched up the first $7,000 of that $20,500 and would have contributed that $7,000 to our 401K.

So in total, our contribution $20,500 + employer match up contribution $7,000 = $27,500 would have gone into our 401K account. Employer match of $7,000 would not come under the contribution limit of $20,500. This match is over that contribution limit. In this employer match, each employer has a catch called "Vesting Schedule". This vesting schedule defines when that extra amount matched up by the employer is going to actually credit in our account. Let's say that an employer has a vesting schedule of 2 years, then in that 2 years, the match up amount contributed by the employer will be in our account, but not vested. That means, if we leave the job within the 2 years of joining, then we will not get that matched up amount. But after 2 years, that matched up amount will be ours totally, even if we leave the job. Also, after that vesting period of 2 years, all money matched up by the employer will be vested (available) to us immediately. That means, there will not be any restriction over the matched up money after passing 2 years.

The 2 years I am referring here is just an example. It will be different for every employer. So what is the advantage to us from this 401K? The advantage is, we do not have to pay the tax on the amount we are contributing to 401K. But we should pay tax on withdrawal after retirement. What? No tax for the contributed money, but taxed on withdrawal? What benefit does that offer to us? Good question. To understand that, we should know about our tax bracket.

What we are seeing here is 2022 Married Filing Jointly tax bracket. Let's say that our family income is $120,000. We will come under 22% tax bracket. That does not mean that we will be paying 22% tax for the whole $120,000 we earned. First 20,000 of $120,000 will be taxed at 10%. Next 63,000 will be taxed at 12%. Money earned over that will be taxed at 22% tax. So the 22% tax is charged for the top most dollar we made in that year. This is called as Marginal Tax rate. If we add up all the taxes for individual brackets of 10%, 12% and 22%, that comes out to $17,634. This is 14.7% of our total income $120,000. So actually we are paying only 14.7% of our income as tax. This 14.7% is called "Effective Tax Rate". May confuse between marginal tax rate and effective tax rate. Hope it is clear now. So when we contribute $20,500 to our 401K, it comes out of our top most tax bracket. That means, the tax we saved from the contribution of $20,500 is 22%. $4510. If we withdraw the same $20,500 after our retirement, the tax rate for that would be 10%.

Tax saved for contribution is 22%, while money coming out is taxed at 10%. The difference is 12% in our favor. Or in other words, we save tax in marginal tax rate for contribution and we pay effective tax rate while withdrawal. We all know that effective tax rate will be always lower than the marginal tax rate. This is first advantage. Let's check out a sample calculation to understand the next advantage. Let's say that our family income is $120,000. Then federal marginal tax rate is 22%. Let's use Illinois state tax rate – 5%. For 401K contribution, not just the federal tax, we don't have to pay the state tax as well. Let's assume that our 401K will be growing at 8% growth rate.

We are maxing out our 401K contribution every year by contributing 20,500/year. Tax savings from this contribution is 27%. $5535. We are continuing to do this till our retirement for 25 years. By the end of 25 years, our 401K balance would have reached 1 million 600,000 dollars. The $5535 that we saved every year in tax alone would have grown into $437,000. The absolute tax saved is 5355 * 25 = $138,000. The growth from that savings is approximately $300,000. Or in other words, just because we did not pay (deferred) the tax of $138,000, the extra growth we got from that is $300,000. The growth of money by deferring (not paying the tax now) the taxes to pay later is called as "Tax deferred Compounding". This tax deferred compounding is 401K's second advantage. For these 2 advantages, we can contribute to 401K. We should. So far we have seen a regular pretax 401K. There are other flavors of 401K like Roth 401K and After tax 401K. We will dig deeper into that in the next episode. Thank You..

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401K to Gold IRA Rollover

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The $65,000 Roth IRA Mistake To Avoid

– I've seen too many of
you making some mistakes when it comes to investing
in your Roth IRA. One of them could cost you
$65,000 and the other one could cost you almost $500,000. You guys are seriously going
to make my beard turn more gray than it already is if
you don't knock it off. So let me show you what to watch out for, that way, you don't lose more money than you have to and
I can save a few bucks on hair dye for a couple more years. A Roth IRA is a self-directed
retirement account where you can contribute after
tax dollars to be invested. Since the money going in is taxed, the growth of your investments are not taxed and the money withdrawal from the account are never taxed either, as long as you don't try to pull out some of the money before the age of 59.5. There is no such thing
as a joint Roth IRA. So if you and your spouse
want to contribute to one, then you'll have to do it individually, hence the name Individual
Retirement Account.

If you both have enough
earned income separately, then you can each invest up to the $6500 limit for the year. If one of you works and the other doesn't, but you file a joint tax return, then the person working can, of course, contribute to a Roth IRA and
your spouse can contribute to a Spousal Roth IRA as well. Remember, these accounts are
owned by the individual person and on paper, not co-owned by both people. I want to try to encourage you to max out your Roth IRA every single year, if possible, because if you
don't do it for that year, then in the future you
cannot go back and contribute for a previous year once that time limit has passed. A Roth IRA is one of those accounts where I would bend over backwards to make sure that I can
put in the full amount allowed every single year.

In my order of operations for
what to do with your money, I have maxing out a Roth
IRA right after investing up to your employer match and HSA. That is how important
this type of account is. The good news with this
is that you actually have a timeframe of 16
months to contribute for each calendar year. So if we are in 2023
right now, then you have from January 1st, 2023, up until
when taxes need to be filed for that year to contribute,
which in this case, would be April 15th, 2024. That's how it is every single year, so ignore the actual dates in my example and pay more attention to the timeframes since the date taxes are due
will change by a few days from year to year. Most brokerages will ask
you which year you want to contribute to. For example, I personally
invest using M1 Finance, which you can check out down
in the description below, and also get a deposit bonus as well.

If I contributed to my Roth
IRA through them right now, then they would ask if I wanted the money to go towards 2022 or 2023, since at the time of recording this, we haven't hit the date
where taxes are due. This is great because it
gives you some extra time beyond the current year to
contribute Roth IRA money for that year. Before I tell you the next mistake that I see way too many people making, please help support my dog Molly by hitting that thumbs up
button and sharing this video with anyone you think it would help. Once you deposit money into your Roth IRA, there's one more extremely important step you need to do that I see a ton of people missing, and that is
actually investing the money.

I can't tell you how
many people I've talked to over the years who just put money into the account assuming
it would automatically grow, or knowing that they
needed to invest the money, but just forgetting to do
it because life happens, and things naturally slip out of our mind, only to check their account
balance years later, realizing that it hasn't grown in value because they didn't invest the money. Stop the nonsense here and
just set up auto investing within your investment account, and if you're waiting because you think that you can time the market
to buy in at a lower price, you can't, because it's
nearly impossible to do, so just to get the money
invested right now. If you know how you want to
invest the money, then great. If you don't, then I personally
like the two fund portfolio for people who are in
the accumulation phase of investing and in the
three fund portfolio for when you're closer to
retirement or in retirement.

I'll have a link to a
playlist then I made just for you where I teach you
about both of those portfolios down in the description below
and above my head as well. When you contribute to a Roth IRA, all of your money is not
locked up until 59.5. You can withdraw the
contributions that you've made before that age without paying a penalty, but you cannot withdraw any of
the gains within the account. For example, if you've contributed $6500 and the account has grown to $10,000, then you can withdraw
the $6500 contribution, but you cannot touch the $3500 gain without paying a penalty until 59.5. I've gotta interject for a second to give my personal opinion on this.

While withdrawing money
penalty-free is an option, I want to encourage you not to do this. To be brutally honest, I think that doing this
is one of the dumbest, most irresponsible, short-sighted
things that you can do. Withdrawing just $6500
worth of contributions would cost you $65,000 in
future investment growth. So when any money is
taken out of this account before retirement, think
about how it's actually going to cost you 7,800 Chipotle burritos, or 65 new Apple iPhones, or anything else that you would buy for that amount of money. And yes, I am fully aware
that you can do a penalty-free early withdrawal up to
$10,000 before the age of 59.5 for a first time home purchase. But this is just as stupid as withdrawing your contributions early
because that $10,000 is costing you over $100,000
in future investment growth when you pull that money out. Average annual home appreciation over the past 12 years has been 6.11%, and the US stock market
has returned 12.27%. Leave your money in the freaking Roth IRA and go earn that $10,000 that
you need to buy the home. Responsible investing takes time, like five or 10-plus years, and this money needs time to grow. The second you withdraw
any of your contributions, you are cutting down that tree before it even has a chance to grow fruit.

Once you withdraw
contributions from the past, you cannot replace that
money in the future. I get that emergencies happen in life, so that's why you need
to have money set aside in an emergency fund to
pay for those things. Do not, under 99.999% of circumstances, use your Roth IRA money for anything other than when you retire. One thing I see way too many people doing is investing in a
taxable brokerage account before they have their Roth
IRA maxed out for the year. This is a huge mistake from a tax savings
perspective for some of you because of how each account is taxed. With a Roth IRA, you invest with money
that's already been taxed, so the money can grow tax-free
and be withdrawn tax-free. With a taxable brokerage
account, you are paying taxes for the ongoing dividend
distributions every single year. Then you have to pay capital gains tax when you go to withdraw the money. Since the money within
a Roth IRA will grow and can be withdrawn tax-free, realistically, you want
this account to get as large as possible, but not at the expense of
your personal risk tolerance.

You should not take on
additional levels of risk by investing in more
risky, unprofitable stocks that random YouTubers have been pumping over the past few years or actively manage funds to
try to achieve higher returns. 99% of people, including
myself, cannot handle investing in something with a
high risk and potential, potential, high return. So don't even bother. The money in this account
is for retirement, so is it really worth it to risk that 60-year-old's financial wellbeing because you decided to gamble with their money right now? I doubt it.

Some of you might be over
the income limit to be able to contribute to a Roth IRA, or some of you will be at
that point in the future as your income grows. You can still contribute to a Roth IRA to take advantage of the tax-free growth by doing a backdoor Roth. To simply explain the process,
all you do is contribute to a traditional IRA. Do not invest the money yet. Then contact your brokerage
to have them convert the money to a Roth IRA. Now, I have done it with M1 Finance before and it was extremely easy. It only took I think two or three days for the money to get into my Roth IRA. Only do this if it makes sense based on your current tax rates
and future financial plans.

There's two things that you can do. if you are someone who thinks that you might be over the income limit, but you are not going to 100%
know until the year is over. Number one, you can
either wait until January of the following year,
like we talked about in one of the previous mistakes that
I mentioned, or number two, you can just contribute the
money to a traditional IRA, then do a backdoor Roth within
the year to get the money into the account so it can be invested. That way, if you are
over the income limit, you've already done the backdoor Roth. If you're under the income limit, no big deal 'cause you had to pay taxes on that money that was going
into the Roth IRA anyways. A question I get a lot is
whether or not you can contribute to a Roth IRA on different brokerages.

The simple answer is yes. This is how it would play out. You can contribute up to the max for one year
on, say, M1 Finance. Then you can decide to contribute up to the max on fidelity the next year. Then you can contribute up to the max on Vanguard the following year. So by the end of that third year, you would have three different Roth IRAs with three different brokerages, and there is no problem with that. You can take it one step further. If you decide, hey, out of these three, I actually like M1 finance
better than the other two, you can convert the
Roth IRAs with Fidelity and Vanguard into your
M1 Finance Roth IRA. You can also split up your contribution for the same year among
different brokerages. So if for this year you want
to say contribute $4,000 to an M1 Finance Roth IRA and the remaining $2,500
into a Fidelity Roth IRA, then you can do that without any problems.

The only thing you
cannot do is try to game the system by saying contributing $6500 into an M1 Finance Roth IRA and $6500 into a Roth IRA with another brokerage. You cannot exceed the maximum
amount allowed per year across all of your Roth IRAs on all of your brokerage accounts. Technically, you could do that since all of the brokerages aren't talking
to each other to keep track of what you are contributing, so you have to self-manage this. I would highly, highly recommend making sure
that you do not do this, whether it's on purpose or on accident. I don't know what the penalty is for this, but all I know is that you do
not want to get caught trying to defraud the government
in any way, shape, or form. Long-term investing is the name
of the game with a Roth IRA. This money is for when
you are in retirement, so make sure to take that into account when investing this money. No gambling it on stocks
that random YouTubers are promoting. I think the two or three fund portfolio is perfect for your Roth IRA, which you can learn more about
in these videos to your left.

There's a bunch of free stocks and resources down in
the description below to help with all of your personal finance and investing needs. I'll see you in the next one, friends, go..

As found on YouTube

401K to Gold IRA Rollover

Read More

Building Wealth (Ep.2) – Delayed Gratification (தமிழ்)

We went through the importance of "Developing Financial Knowledge" in the last episode. If you have not watched it yet, please watch that first. Today we are going to watch the second episode in the series "Building Wealth". Delayed Gratification Gratification means – We all have our own desires right? When we attain those desires, we get this great satisfaction right? That satisfaction is what is called "Gratification" in English. "Isn't attaining our desires is a good thing? Why should we delay?" – you ask. Explaining that is the purpose of this episode. If "Financial Knowledge" is the architect of building wealth, "Savings Rate" is its foundation. Our foundation will be as strong as our savings rate. We already know this from "Financial Freedom" episode. Most of us will achieve 20% savings rate easily. But to go beyond that, we need to know some strategies. Normally what we do is, we keep upgrading our lifestyle in line with our earnings. We will be with four roommates when we start working.

In 2-3 years, our salary will double. When that happens, we upgrade ourselves from 4 room mates to 1 room mate. Then in 2-3 years, we get married. Then we upgrade ourselves to a one bedroom apartment. Then in 2 years, we upgrade to a two bedroom apartment. Then after kids, we buy our own home. So depending on our career growth, we keep upgrading our lifestyle. Then expenses add up with kids, school fees and so on. It never comes down. After 40 years, we will come to a sudden realization, that we have crossed half our life time, but all that left is just our home as asset.

We start thinking about retirement and investments only after that. But by that time, we will have other responsibilities. Saving for kids college, marriage become our priorities. Just like that, our life would just pass away. Next generation will follow the same pattern as well. How can we build wealth if we live like this? Life of a US settled person is also very similar to this. But they do one more thing after 40. They sell their current home and upgrade to a bigger home. So we are keep upgrading our life style depending on our financial growth from our career. Regardless of how much we earn, we spend to match that earnings growth.

If we want to break this cycle and move to next level, there is just only one option. That is – Delayed Gratification. That is – instead of enjoying the life upgrades immediately we can postpone it to some time, and attain financial growth. Before we check out on how we can do that, a small tidbit about "Delayed Gratification". In 1960's, Stanford University conducted a psychological experiment called "Marshmallow Experiment" with kids.

Marshmallow is something that looks like a thicker version of Cotton Candy. It is white and super sweet. Kids love it. They used 3.5 to 5.5 years old kids for this experiment. What they did was, They asked a kid to stay inside a room and they put a marshmallow on a plate in front of them. They made a deal with that kid. The deal is – I will leave the room now. But will be coming back after 15 mins. If you have not eaten the marshmallow by the time I come back, you will get two marshmallows instead of one. So – the kid has two choices. There is a marshmallow right in front of kid's eyes. Instead of waiting for another marshmallow for 15 mins, the kid can eat one right now. Or wait for 15 mins and eat two marshmallows instead of one. When we hand over a fish to a cat, is it possible for the cat not to eat the fish? 7 out of 10 kids ate the marshmallow immediately. But 3 out of 10 kids controlled their temptation and waited for the second marshmallow successfully.

Stanford University did not stop their research at that. They followed these kids for 40 years to see how they are doing in their life. The kids who waited patiently settled better in their life. They did well in their college entrance exams. They did not fall addicted to any drugs. They did not have obesity issues. They used their "Self Control" capability totally to their advantage. What we learn from here is, people who have a strong mindset and who do not get distracted easily are very disciplined and they set up a goal for themselves and attain it as well. They do not think in short term. They plan for long term and achieve it successfully.

We will see this "Long Term Planning" more in detail in another episode. Coming back to our topic – "Life Upgrade" How many upgrades do we see in our adult life? We upgrade from 4 room mates to 1. We upgrade from 1 room mate to separate apartment. From 1 BR we upgrade to 2 Bedroom. From 2 Bedroom, we upgrade to own house. Even for own house, we again upgrade to a bigger home. All these are housing upgrades. Like this, We upgrade from pubic transportation to bike. From bike to car. From car to luxury car. These are upgrades in our personal vehicle. We don't do these upgrades without a reason. We do it to match our earnings. If we do not upgrade our life styles along with our earnings growth, but delay it by 2 to 3 years – what happens then? The salary rise will go directly to our savings rather than for life upgrades and will increase our savings rate.

If the savings rate increases, the foundation of "wealth building" will be super strong. Think about it. If our whole life is 80 years, Its not really a big deal to delay our upgrades for 3-5 years. We are going to attain all these anyways. Its just that we are going to do it bit later. So, we have two choices. 1. Live in the moment by upgrading our lifestyle depending on our earnings growth. Or 1. Postpone the upgrades for a while and use that savings to build a strong nest egg so that we can even pass our wealth to next generation.

The choice is ours. Now we can see the benefits that we can get out of "Delayed Gratification" at high level. We will see how we can apply this strategically in different stages of life in next episode. Thank You..

As found on YouTube

Retire Wealthy Home

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The $65,000 Roth IRA Mistake To Avoid

– I've seen too many of
you making some mistakes when it comes to investing
in your Roth IRA. One of them could cost you
$65,000 and the other one could cost you almost $500,000. You guys are seriously going
to make my beard turn more gray than it already is if
you don't knock it off. So let me show you what to watch out for, that way, you don't lose more money than you have to and
I can save a few bucks on hair dye for a couple more years.

A Roth IRA is a self-directed
retirement account where you can contribute after
tax dollars to be invested. Since the money going in is taxed, the growth of your investments are not taxed and the money withdrawal from the account are never taxed either, as long as you don't try to pull out some of the money before the age of 59.5. There is no such thing
as a joint Roth IRA. So if you and your spouse
want to contribute to one, then you'll have to do it individually, hence the name Individual
Retirement Account. If you both have enough
earned income separately, then you can each invest up to the $6500 limit for the year. If one of you works and the other doesn't, but you file a joint tax return, then the person working can, of course, contribute to a Roth IRA and
your spouse can contribute to a Spousal Roth IRA as well. Remember, these accounts are
owned by the individual person and on paper, not co-owned by both people.

I want to try to encourage you to max out your Roth IRA every single year, if possible, because if you
don't do it for that year, then in the future you
cannot go back and contribute for a previous year once that time limit has passed. A Roth IRA is one of those accounts where I would bend over backwards to make sure that I can
put in the full amount allowed every single year. In my order of operations for
what to do with your money, I have maxing out a Roth
IRA right after investing up to your employer match and HSA. That is how important
this type of account is. The good news with this
is that you actually have a timeframe of 16
months to contribute for each calendar year. So if we are in 2023
right now, then you have from January 1st, 2023, up until
when taxes need to be filed for that year to contribute,
which in this case, would be April 15th, 2024.

That's how it is every single year, so ignore the actual dates in my example and pay more attention to the timeframes since the date taxes are due
will change by a few days from year to year. Most brokerages will ask
you which year you want to contribute to. For example, I personally
invest using M1 Finance, which you can check out down
in the description below, and also get a deposit bonus as well. If I contributed to my Roth
IRA through them right now, then they would ask if I wanted the money to go towards 2022 or 2023, since at the time of recording this, we haven't hit the date
where taxes are due. This is great because it
gives you some extra time beyond the current year to
contribute Roth IRA money for that year.

Before I tell you the next mistake that I see way too many people making, please help support my dog Molly by hitting that thumbs up
button and sharing this video with anyone you think it would help. Once you deposit money into your Roth IRA, there's one more extremely important step you need to do that I see a ton of people missing, and that is
actually investing the money. I can't tell you how
many people I've talked to over the years who just put money into the account assuming
it would automatically grow, or knowing that they
needed to invest the money, but just forgetting to do
it because life happens, and things naturally slip out of our mind, only to check their account
balance years later, realizing that it hasn't grown in value because they didn't invest the money.

Stop the nonsense here and
just set up auto investing within your investment account, and if you're waiting because you think that you can time the market
to buy in at a lower price, you can't, because it's
nearly impossible to do, so just to get the money
invested right now. If you know how you want to
invest the money, then great. If you don't, then I personally
like the two fund portfolio for people who are in
the accumulation phase of investing and in the
three fund portfolio for when you're closer to
retirement or in retirement.

I'll have a link to a
playlist then I made just for you where I teach you
about both of those portfolios down in the description below
and above my head as well. When you contribute to a Roth IRA, all of your money is not
locked up until 59.5. You can withdraw the
contributions that you've made before that age without paying a penalty, but you cannot withdraw any of
the gains within the account. For example, if you've contributed $6500 and the account has grown to $10,000, then you can withdraw
the $6500 contribution, but you cannot touch the $3500 gain without paying a penalty until 59.5. I've gotta interject for a second to give my personal opinion on this. While withdrawing money
penalty-free is an option, I want to encourage you not to do this. To be brutally honest, I think that doing this
is one of the dumbest, most irresponsible, short-sighted
things that you can do.

Withdrawing just $6500
worth of contributions would cost you $65,000 in
future investment growth. So when any money is
taken out of this account before retirement, think
about how it's actually going to cost you 7,800 Chipotle burritos, or 65 new Apple iPhones, or anything else that you would buy for that amount of money. And yes, I am fully aware
that you can do a penalty-free early withdrawal up to
$10,000 before the age of 59.5 for a first time home purchase. But this is just as stupid as withdrawing your contributions early
because that $10,000 is costing you over $100,000
in future investment growth when you pull that money out. Average annual home appreciation over the past 12 years has been 6.11%, and the US stock market
has returned 12.27%. Leave your money in the freaking Roth IRA and go earn that $10,000 that
you need to buy the home. Responsible investing takes time, like five or 10-plus years, and this money needs time to grow.

The second you withdraw
any of your contributions, you are cutting down that tree before it even has a chance to grow fruit. Once you withdraw
contributions from the past, you cannot replace that
money in the future. I get that emergencies happen in life, so that's why you need
to have money set aside in an emergency fund to
pay for those things. Do not, under 99.999% of circumstances, use your Roth IRA money for anything other than when you retire. One thing I see way too many people doing is investing in a
taxable brokerage account before they have their Roth
IRA maxed out for the year.

This is a huge mistake from a tax savings
perspective for some of you because of how each account is taxed. With a Roth IRA, you invest with money
that's already been taxed, so the money can grow tax-free
and be withdrawn tax-free. With a taxable brokerage
account, you are paying taxes for the ongoing dividend
distributions every single year. Then you have to pay capital gains tax when you go to withdraw the money.

Since the money within
a Roth IRA will grow and can be withdrawn tax-free, realistically, you want
this account to get as large as possible, but not at the expense of
your personal risk tolerance. You should not take on
additional levels of risk by investing in more
risky, unprofitable stocks that random YouTubers have been pumping over the past few years or actively manage funds to
try to achieve higher returns. 99% of people, including
myself, cannot handle investing in something with a
high risk and potential, potential, high return. So don't even bother. The money in this account
is for retirement, so is it really worth it to risk that 60-year-old's financial wellbeing because you decided to gamble with their money right now? I doubt it. Some of you might be over
the income limit to be able to contribute to a Roth IRA, or some of you will be at
that point in the future as your income grows. You can still contribute to a Roth IRA to take advantage of the tax-free growth by doing a backdoor Roth. To simply explain the process,
all you do is contribute to a traditional IRA.

Do not invest the money yet. Then contact your brokerage
to have them convert the money to a Roth IRA. Now, I have done it with M1 Finance before and it was extremely easy. It only took I think two or three days for the money to get into my Roth IRA. Only do this if it makes sense based on your current tax rates
and future financial plans. There's two things that you can do. if you are someone who thinks that you might be over the income limit, but you are not going to 100%
know until the year is over. Number one, you can
either wait until January of the following year,
like we talked about in one of the previous mistakes that
I mentioned, or number two, you can just contribute the
money to a traditional IRA, then do a backdoor Roth within
the year to get the money into the account so it can be invested.

That way, if you are
over the income limit, you've already done the backdoor Roth. If you're under the income limit, no big deal 'cause you had to pay taxes on that money that was going
into the Roth IRA anyways. A question I get a lot is
whether or not you can contribute to a Roth IRA on different brokerages. The simple answer is yes. This is how it would play out. You can contribute up to the max for one year
on, say, M1 Finance.

Then you can decide to contribute up to the max on fidelity the next year. Then you can contribute up to the max on Vanguard the following year. So by the end of that third year, you would have three different Roth IRAs with three different brokerages, and there is no problem with that. You can take it one step further. If you decide, hey, out of these three, I actually like M1 finance
better than the other two, you can convert the
Roth IRAs with Fidelity and Vanguard into your
M1 Finance Roth IRA.

You can also split up your contribution for the same year among
different brokerages. So if for this year you want
to say contribute $4,000 to an M1 Finance Roth IRA and the remaining $2,500
into a Fidelity Roth IRA, then you can do that without any problems. The only thing you
cannot do is try to game the system by saying contributing $6500 into an M1 Finance Roth IRA and $6500 into a Roth IRA with another brokerage. You cannot exceed the maximum
amount allowed per year across all of your Roth IRAs on all of your brokerage accounts. Technically, you could do that since all of the brokerages aren't talking
to each other to keep track of what you are contributing, so you have to self-manage this. I would highly, highly recommend making sure
that you do not do this, whether it's on purpose or on accident. I don't know what the penalty is for this, but all I know is that you do
not want to get caught trying to defraud the government
in any way, shape, or form.

Long-term investing is the name
of the game with a Roth IRA. This money is for when
you are in retirement, so make sure to take that into account when investing this money. No gambling it on stocks
that random YouTubers are promoting. I think the two or three fund portfolio is perfect for your Roth IRA, which you can learn more about
in these videos to your left. There's a bunch of free stocks and resources down in
the description below to help with all of your personal finance and investing needs. I'll see you in the next one, friends, go..

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The $65,000 Roth IRA Mistake To Avoid

– I've seen too many of
you making some mistakes when it comes to investing
in your Roth IRA. One of them could cost you
$65,000 and the other one could cost you almost $500,000. You guys are seriously going
to make my beard turn more gray than it already is if
you don't knock it off. So let me show you what to watch out for, that way, you don't lose more money than you have to and
I can save a few bucks on hair dye for a couple more years. A Roth IRA is a self-directed
retirement account where you can contribute after
tax dollars to be invested. Since the money going in is taxed, the growth of your investments are not taxed and the money withdrawal from the account are never taxed either, as long as you don't try to pull out some of the money before the age of 59.5.

There is no such thing
as a joint Roth IRA. So if you and your spouse
want to contribute to one, then you'll have to do it individually, hence the name Individual
Retirement Account. If you both have enough
earned income separately, then you can each invest up to the $6500 limit for the year. If one of you works and the other doesn't, but you file a joint tax return, then the person working can, of course, contribute to a Roth IRA and
your spouse can contribute to a Spousal Roth IRA as well.

Remember, these accounts are
owned by the individual person and on paper, not co-owned by both people. I want to try to encourage you to max out your Roth IRA every single year, if possible, because if you
don't do it for that year, then in the future you
cannot go back and contribute for a previous year once that time limit has passed. A Roth IRA is one of those accounts where I would bend over backwards to make sure that I can
put in the full amount allowed every single year. In my order of operations for
what to do with your money, I have maxing out a Roth
IRA right after investing up to your employer match and HSA. That is how important
this type of account is. The good news with this
is that you actually have a timeframe of 16
months to contribute for each calendar year. So if we are in 2023
right now, then you have from January 1st, 2023, up until
when taxes need to be filed for that year to contribute,
which in this case, would be April 15th, 2024.

That's how it is every single year, so ignore the actual dates in my example and pay more attention to the timeframes since the date taxes are due
will change by a few days from year to year. Most brokerages will ask
you which year you want to contribute to. For example, I personally
invest using M1 Finance, which you can check out down
in the description below, and also get a deposit bonus as well. If I contributed to my Roth
IRA through them right now, then they would ask if I wanted the money to go towards 2022 or 2023, since at the time of recording this, we haven't hit the date
where taxes are due. This is great because it
gives you some extra time beyond the current year to
contribute Roth IRA money for that year. Before I tell you the next mistake that I see way too many people making, please help support my dog Molly by hitting that thumbs up
button and sharing this video with anyone you think it would help.

Once you deposit money into your Roth IRA, there's one more extremely important step you need to do that I see a ton of people missing, and that is
actually investing the money. I can't tell you how
many people I've talked to over the years who just put money into the account assuming
it would automatically grow, or knowing that they
needed to invest the money, but just forgetting to do
it because life happens, and things naturally slip out of our mind, only to check their account
balance years later, realizing that it hasn't grown in value because they didn't invest the money. Stop the nonsense here and
just set up auto investing within your investment account, and if you're waiting because you think that you can time the market
to buy in at a lower price, you can't, because it's
nearly impossible to do, so just to get the money
invested right now.

If you know how you want to
invest the money, then great. If you don't, then I personally
like the two fund portfolio for people who are in
the accumulation phase of investing and in the
three fund portfolio for when you're closer to
retirement or in retirement. I'll have a link to a
playlist then I made just for you where I teach you
about both of those portfolios down in the description below
and above my head as well.

When you contribute to a Roth IRA, all of your money is not
locked up until 59.5. You can withdraw the
contributions that you've made before that age without paying a penalty, but you cannot withdraw any of
the gains within the account. For example, if you've contributed $6500 and the account has grown to $10,000, then you can withdraw
the $6500 contribution, but you cannot touch the $3500 gain without paying a penalty until 59.5. I've gotta interject for a second to give my personal opinion on this. While withdrawing money
penalty-free is an option, I want to encourage you not to do this.

To be brutally honest, I think that doing this
is one of the dumbest, most irresponsible, short-sighted
things that you can do. Withdrawing just $6500
worth of contributions would cost you $65,000 in
future investment growth. So when any money is
taken out of this account before retirement, think
about how it's actually going to cost you 7,800 Chipotle burritos, or 65 new Apple iPhones, or anything else that you would buy for that amount of money. And yes, I am fully aware
that you can do a penalty-free early withdrawal up to
$10,000 before the age of 59.5 for a first time home purchase. But this is just as stupid as withdrawing your contributions early
because that $10,000 is costing you over $100,000
in future investment growth when you pull that money out. Average annual home appreciation over the past 12 years has been 6.11%, and the US stock market
has returned 12.27%.

Leave your money in the freaking Roth IRA and go earn that $10,000 that
you need to buy the home. Responsible investing takes time, like five or 10-plus years, and this money needs time to grow. The second you withdraw
any of your contributions, you are cutting down that tree before it even has a chance to grow fruit. Once you withdraw
contributions from the past, you cannot replace that
money in the future. I get that emergencies happen in life, so that's why you need
to have money set aside in an emergency fund to
pay for those things.

Do not, under 99.999% of circumstances, use your Roth IRA money for anything other than when you retire. One thing I see way too many people doing is investing in a
taxable brokerage account before they have their Roth
IRA maxed out for the year. This is a huge mistake from a tax savings
perspective for some of you because of how each account is taxed. With a Roth IRA, you invest with money
that's already been taxed, so the money can grow tax-free
and be withdrawn tax-free.

With a taxable brokerage
account, you are paying taxes for the ongoing dividend
distributions every single year. Then you have to pay capital gains tax when you go to withdraw the money. Since the money within
a Roth IRA will grow and can be withdrawn tax-free, realistically, you want
this account to get as large as possible, but not at the expense of
your personal risk tolerance. You should not take on
additional levels of risk by investing in more
risky, unprofitable stocks that random YouTubers have been pumping over the past few years or actively manage funds to
try to achieve higher returns.

99% of people, including
myself, cannot handle investing in something with a
high risk and potential, potential, high return. So don't even bother. The money in this account
is for retirement, so is it really worth it to risk that 60-year-old's financial wellbeing because you decided to gamble with their money right now? I doubt it. Some of you might be over
the income limit to be able to contribute to a Roth IRA, or some of you will be at
that point in the future as your income grows. You can still contribute to a Roth IRA to take advantage of the tax-free growth by doing a backdoor Roth.

To simply explain the process,
all you do is contribute to a traditional IRA. Do not invest the money yet. Then contact your brokerage
to have them convert the money to a Roth IRA. Now, I have done it with M1 Finance before and it was extremely easy. It only took I think two or three days for the money to get into my Roth IRA. Only do this if it makes sense based on your current tax rates
and future financial plans. There's two things that you can do. if you are someone who thinks that you might be over the income limit, but you are not going to 100%
know until the year is over. Number one, you can
either wait until January of the following year,
like we talked about in one of the previous mistakes that
I mentioned, or number two, you can just contribute the
money to a traditional IRA, then do a backdoor Roth within
the year to get the money into the account so it can be invested.

That way, if you are
over the income limit, you've already done the backdoor Roth. If you're under the income limit, no big deal 'cause you had to pay taxes on that money that was going
into the Roth IRA anyways. A question I get a lot is
whether or not you can contribute to a Roth IRA on different brokerages. The simple answer is yes. This is how it would play out. You can contribute up to the max for one year
on, say, M1 Finance. Then you can decide to contribute up to the max on fidelity the next year. Then you can contribute up to the max on Vanguard the following year. So by the end of that third year, you would have three different Roth IRAs with three different brokerages, and there is no problem with that.

You can take it one step further. If you decide, hey, out of these three, I actually like M1 finance
better than the other two, you can convert the
Roth IRAs with Fidelity and Vanguard into your
M1 Finance Roth IRA. You can also split up your contribution for the same year among
different brokerages. So if for this year you want
to say contribute $4,000 to an M1 Finance Roth IRA and the remaining $2,500
into a Fidelity Roth IRA, then you can do that without any problems.

The only thing you
cannot do is try to game the system by saying contributing $6500 into an M1 Finance Roth IRA and $6500 into a Roth IRA with another brokerage. You cannot exceed the maximum
amount allowed per year across all of your Roth IRAs on all of your brokerage accounts. Technically, you could do that since all of the brokerages aren't talking
to each other to keep track of what you are contributing, so you have to self-manage this.

I would highly, highly recommend making sure
that you do not do this, whether it's on purpose or on accident. I don't know what the penalty is for this, but all I know is that you do
not want to get caught trying to defraud the government
in any way, shape, or form. Long-term investing is the name
of the game with a Roth IRA. This money is for when
you are in retirement, so make sure to take that into account when investing this money. No gambling it on stocks
that random YouTubers are promoting. I think the two or three fund portfolio is perfect for your Roth IRA, which you can learn more about
in these videos to your left.

There's a bunch of free stocks and resources down in
the description below to help with all of your personal finance and investing needs. I'll see you in the next one, friends, go..

As found on YouTube

401K to Gold IRA Rollover

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401K Explained in தமிழ் (US Retirement Series – 1)

This episode and next few episodes are going to be US specific episodes. All these US specific episodes will have US flag in their thumbnails. Indian audience, feel free to skip these episodes and save your time. US folks, there are 2 main retirement plans in USA. 1. 401K and 2. IRA. We will cover more in detail about IRA in another episode. In this episode, we will cover 401K in detail. Hi. My name is Vijay Mohan. You are watching – Investment Insights. 401K is a retirement plan offered thru employer. We will not be able to open a 401K account just by ourself like a brokerage account. We can contribute to a 401K, only if it is offered through our employer. Almost all employers offer 401K plan. Very few small companies do not offer 401K. How much can we contribute to a 401K? Each employee can save up to $20,500 per year.

If husband and wife both are working, both can contribute $20,500 each. People older than 50 can contribute more – $27,000/year. That is called as "Catch up contribution". Other than our contribution to 401K, many employers match up our contribution up to certain percentage. Let's say that an employer is matching up to 7%. If our salary is $100K, 7% of that would be $7,000. Let's say that we are contributing $20,500 to our 401k and maxing it out. Employer would have matched up the first $7,000 of that $20,500 and would have contributed that $7,000 to our 401K. So in total, our contribution $20,500 + employer match up contribution $7,000 = $27,500 would have gone into our 401K account. Employer match of $7,000 would not come under the contribution limit of $20,500. This match is over that contribution limit.

In this employer match, each employer has a catch called "Vesting Schedule". This vesting schedule defines when that extra amount matched up by the employer is going to actually credit in our account. Let's say that an employer has a vesting schedule of 2 years, then in that 2 years, the match up amount contributed by the employer will be in our account, but not vested. That means, if we leave the job within the 2 years of joining, then we will not get that matched up amount. But after 2 years, that matched up amount will be ours totally, even if we leave the job. Also, after that vesting period of 2 years, all money matched up by the employer will be vested (available) to us immediately. That means, there will not be any restriction over the matched up money after passing 2 years. The 2 years I am referring here is just an example. It will be different for every employer. So what is the advantage to us from this 401K? The advantage is, we do not have to pay the tax on the amount we are contributing to 401K.

But we should pay tax on withdrawal after retirement. What? No tax for the contributed money, but taxed on withdrawal? What benefit does that offer to us? Good question. To understand that, we should know about our tax bracket. What we are seeing here is 2022 Married Filing Jointly tax bracket. Let's say that our family income is $120,000. We will come under 22% tax bracket. That does not mean that we will be paying 22% tax for the whole $120,000 we earned. First 20,000 of $120,000 will be taxed at 10%. Next 63,000 will be taxed at 12%. Money earned over that will be taxed at 22% tax. So the 22% tax is charged for the top most dollar we made in that year. This is called as Marginal Tax rate. If we add up all the taxes for individual brackets of 10%, 12% and 22%, that comes out to $17,634. This is 14.7% of our total income $120,000. So actually we are paying only 14.7% of our income as tax. This 14.7% is called "Effective Tax Rate". May confuse between marginal tax rate and effective tax rate. Hope it is clear now. So when we contribute $20,500 to our 401K, it comes out of our top most tax bracket.

That means, the tax we saved from the contribution of $20,500 is 22%. $4510. If we withdraw the same $20,500 after our retirement, the tax rate for that would be 10%. Tax saved for contribution is 22%, while money coming out is taxed at 10%. The difference is 12% in our favor. Or in other words, we save tax in marginal tax rate for contribution and we pay effective tax rate while withdrawal. We all know that effective tax rate will be always lower than the marginal tax rate.

This is first advantage. Let's check out a sample calculation to understand the next advantage. Let's say that our family income is $120,000. Then federal marginal tax rate is 22%. Let's use Illinois state tax rate – 5%. For 401K contribution, not just the federal tax, we don't have to pay the state tax as well. Let's assume that our 401K will be growing at 8% growth rate. We are maxing out our 401K contribution every year by contributing 20,500/year. Tax savings from this contribution is 27%. $5535. We are continuing to do this till our retirement for 25 years. By the end of 25 years, our 401K balance would have reached 1 million 600,000 dollars. The $5535 that we saved every year in tax alone would have grown into $437,000. The absolute tax saved is 5355 * 25 = $138,000. The growth from that savings is approximately $300,000. Or in other words, just because we did not pay (deferred) the tax of $138,000, the extra growth we got from that is $300,000.

The growth of money by deferring (not paying the tax now) the taxes to pay later is called as "Tax deferred Compounding". This tax deferred compounding is 401K's second advantage. For these 2 advantages, we can contribute to 401K. We should. So far we have seen a regular pretax 401K. There are other flavors of 401K like Roth 401K and After tax 401K. We will dig deeper into that in the next episode. Thank You.

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Building Wealth (Ep.2) – Delayed Gratification (தமிழ்)

That is – rather of enjoying the life upgrades quickly we can postpone it to some time, as well as obtain financial growth. From 1 BR we update to 2 Bedroom.From 2 Bed room, we upgrade to have residence. If our entire life is 80 years, Its not truly a huge bargain to delay our upgrades for 3-5 years.We are going to acquire all these anyways.

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Retire Wealthy Home

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