When most people get started investing they’re bombarded with terms. 401(k), IRA, Roth, 457 – and those are just account types! It’s enough to scare many would-be investors away before they’ve even begun.
Today that will change! This interactive article shows which accounts YOU should focus YOUR time on learning about. To get started investing you don’t have to know everything – that’s what the experts are for. Instead, you just need to know which account (or accounts) are going to be most beneficial for your specific situation.
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I love your interactive pages! I think all of this is great, but I wish you put in a small caveat about insurance plans. I think people need to pay for life and disability insurance, (in most instances), before investing. I know that isn’t the purpose of this post, but I think it’s an important piece of financial advice that often gets overlooked.
Insurance is a tricky one. To be honest I’m not an expert in that case. For most of our careers my wife and I had some form of life insurance from our employers that may cover $100k or so in the event of our deaths, but nothing for disability.
Where would see those two in the stack of accounts? And for how much insurance?
It seems for the 401k match, you’re subtracting $19,500 from the match to include the 401k match from the employer. But, the general limit on total employer and employee contributions for 2020 is $57,000.
Hmm, I think it’s something else actually – which means I’m visualizing it clearly enough.
The 401(k) match + 401(k) sections should equal $19,500 (or $26k if you’re 50+). This doesn’t take into account, or even show how much the company is matching. I considered it, but because so many matches have multiple points (ex: match 100% of first 3%, then 50% of next 3%) I decided not to show or compute how much the company match equals in real dollars.
That does mean that there’s a chance that the full amount of someone’s 401(k) contribution + company contribution could exceed the $57k limit. I should change up the “401(k) match” maximum by an employee to be $19,500/$26k to make that more fool-proof for very large incomes (thanks for the heads up!). If someone’s company matches more than 300% of 100% of their contributions then this would exceed the max, but I think that’s an edge case.
I love these interactive pages so much thank you for using your expertise to creates these for us. Would it be hard to add SIMPLE IRA or SEP IRA accounts? I have a lot of self-employed people and small business owners in my community that I think would benefit from more info on these accounts.
I’m open to adding this! I’m interested to add some of the next most used accounts, and I have a feeling those would be up there on the list.
I like your interactive blog. Talking about the accounts to invest for retirement, I would like if you can actually use cryptocurrency investment to explain further in another post or something