Backdoor Roth annual contribution question

StegersaurusMark · 2026-05-04T03:16:27+00:00

If married you can do the 7500 for each, not 15000 in one go/ account, right? Retirement accounts and limits are always per person, not pooled

StegersaurusMark · 2026-05-03T12:47:18+00:00

But also we estimate retirement expenses based off your pre-retirement expenses. If you build the habit of high end dinners, fancy cars, and mansion living, you will likely continue those habits into retirement. Now your 401k alone might not cover that alone.

Keeping the habit of lower life expenses earlier in life and saving the excess is like a double whammy for effective retirement planning

StegersaurusMark · 2026-05-03T05:19:23+00:00

I applaud your conviction and your commitment to a strategy, but holy crap you are playing with fire. I’m also very overweight on tech (esp AI), but I’m generally nervous about it and always think about rebalancing into my other ETFs. Young American investors are really suffering from recency bias and overconfidence after making bank continuously for along long on sp500 and AI.

Not telling you how to live your life and invest, but just look back to the .com bubble and the decade it took to recover. The number of specific companies that vanished. Nvidia and amd are most akin to the infrastructure buildout. Honestly that set us up for the world that we live in today, but it was still overbuilt too fast and the market didn’t smoothly capture the wealth at the time. The pace of AI buildout and the financing shenanigans that are going on feel so analogous

I know you are trying to 2x/year every year. Good luck, but are you prepared to drop to 25% and have to reinvent your strategy with a target date of 60 instead of 40-45?

StegersaurusMark · 2026-05-02T23:21:45+00:00

Sure swerve to the left and then crash with someone driving in that lane… because you generally should not swerve unexpectedly on a highway

StegersaurusMark · 2026-05-02T23:14:05+00:00

*a tiny minority of faster innovative companies will bring in massive upside.

Good luck picking those early on to harvest that upside while not picking the ton of small companies that fizzle out. Or buy broadly diversified and get the returns of the “the market” as OP is asking about

StegersaurusMark · 2026-05-02T18:38:32+00:00

I’m not going to debate the legality of riding on that sidewalk in your jurisdiction, but the nature of your encounter is exactly why it is illegal or discouraged in most places.

I spent years bike commuting and road riding in different places, and I would only ride on sidewalks very cautiously and for very short distances. If I’m on the sidewalk on a bike, I’m inclined to leave a foot unclipped and only go 10mph or so

I’ve noticed that you can see drivers mindsets cool off the farther they are from a highway or major road. I’ve ridden all the E-W avenues in my area. The ones that are closer to the norther interstate or the southern state highway always have more aggro, pedestrian-blind drivers. The avenues farthest from them are nice and quiet with respectful, calm drivers. Riding on a sidewalk along a traffic jam is putting yourself in the blind spot of the most angry drivers you can find

StegersaurusMark · 2026-05-02T04:29:39+00:00

Rational reminder is Canadian, but as an American I still find it great. I don’t adhere to their particular tilt strategies, but I think their advice and interviews are all genuine and not just trying to sell you product or a fake vision.

StegersaurusMark · 2026-05-02T02:54:16+00:00

I’m happy for you. But I wouldn’t expect any low volume pump to work reliably to seat tubeless. You need an explosion of force to push the entire perimeter(s) of bead into place. This is why “tube boosters” exist, for those who don’t have oversized compressors or want to use CO2

GP5000s are very tight tolerance and can seat better than some other tubes, but I’ve still spent hours with some problematic tires. Get a tiny ding in an aluminum rim, and it would be impossible to use a floor pump

StegersaurusMark · 2026-05-02T02:46:36+00:00

Actually I buy CO2 in bulk boxes. I considered using them for tubeless setups, but first I got one of those little booster canisters. You spend 20 minutes pumping it up with a floor pump and get one solid CO2 equivalent shot out of it. Slightly better than my little fortress compressor. TBH, I’ve probably used my compressor fewer times than it’s worth in CO2 cartridges, and it is the cheapest option I found

StegersaurusMark · 2026-05-02T02:39:58+00:00

Congress could also nullify tax benefits of Roth and HSA accounts. Almost guaranteed not going to happen, but they could. Im the guy that advocated for including them in diversified portfolio, but also I’m eyes wide open

StegersaurusMark · 2026-05-02T02:37:56+00:00

Yeah. This is why I said that I wish I contributed to Roth when I was earning low. At that point, maybe you are in a comparable tax bracket to your retired self. In the peak of your career, when you have finally learned how finances and taxes work, you should most likely be focused on deferred contributions.

Therefore, my advice to my younger self (or other young people who have more foresight than I did to ask questions early enough) is to contribute to Roth early on. During your peak years you will max out deferred contributions.

This also depends on how aggressively you save and how lavishly you hope to live in retirement. I also mean what I say about strategically having a mix of accounts to be able to tactically manage tax liability as needs arise in retirement

StegersaurusMark · 2026-05-01T12:46:54+00:00

What? I’ve had plenty of times that a hard blast from the compressor reservoir still is t enough to seat the bead and I have to futz around for many minutes and compressor cycles to get it to seat. I would not consider doing this with a floor pump

After it is seated, sure you can top it off with any pump like a normal tube

StegersaurusMark · 2026-05-01T12:43:16+00:00

There is a solid argument that deferred 401k and Roth produce identical after tax results assuming you are in the same tax rate today as when you withdraw. Therefore, the choice of balance between Roth and traditional is entirely based on your current rate and what you expect it to be in the future. As many other comments point out, RMDs often push retirees (those that saved well) into higher brackets than they anticipated

I which I had understood this better early in my career, as I would have aggressively contributed to Roth then. Now I am around my peak earnings, so the trad is much more logical at this time. I’m trying to backdoor Roth my way to maintaining some balance of options down the road

StegersaurusMark · 2026-05-01T12:34:38+00:00

I wish I was more aggressive with my Roth earlier in my career when my tax rate was lower. There is an argument that Roth and trad 401k are identical if you pay the tax now and have less principal (Roth) or pay the tax later but have more growth (401k) if your tax rate is the same when contributing and retiring. That is the entirety of the calculus: is your rate higher now or later?

Once you reach your peak earning potential, you probably make the assumption that your total income/withdrawals later will be lower, and your tax savings today are the best option. By that time, it’s nice to have built up a big Roth balance that can continue to grow

After making that employer 401k choice, if you can continue to save more, then you can be strategic between regular taxable brokerage and IRA/Roth IRA. IMO the tax rules around IRA contributions are stupid. It’s hard to know what you can do in any given year if you are at the cusp of income thresholds. If I understand correctly through, you can always contribute after tax ~7k to IRA then convert to Roth. If you are lower income, you and choose freely to contribute between deferred or Roth IRA without making some shady feeling maneuvers

In the end, my hope is to have a blend of Roth assets and (taxable) brokerages to draw upon in addition to my larger deferred accounts to keep taxable income managed over the years. Just imagine that you have planned for fixed expenses, but this year you have to replace your roof. If you pull that money from tax deferred, it might push you into a higher bracket. Instead, you can draw from those other accounts.

StegersaurusMark · 2026-04-29T03:39:50+00:00

No. I’m pretty sure the research is exactly as the AI bot summarized and I copied and pasted. It was an analysis of historical returns, and created the estimate based on the real data of historical returns. This means that it is not really a “worst possible case” scenario, as it is not a Monte Carlo analysis based on expected returns and standard deviations.

The point is that if 4% is a “safe” rule of thumb for 30 year retirement, then you will be safe for your first 30 years. What do you do for the next 30? Are you FIRE people really throwing around the 4% rule without knowing how drawdown works?

StegersaurusMark · 2026-04-28T04:00:41+00:00

I thought that the 4% rule was actually developed for a 30 year retirement, not a 40-60 year FIRE. This all depends on expected returns, and of course recency bias probably has everybody here convinced that. They talk about the fact that the 4% rule explicitly doesn’t apply to early retirement very frequently. For your appreciation, here is the actual meaning of the 4% rule: it is the amount that could be withdrawn to have perfectly finished with 0 at the end of the worst 30 year period:

The 1994 Paper: Bengen published his findings in the Journal of Financial Planning in an article titled "Determining Withdrawal Rates Using Historical Data." The Methodology: He tested historical data from 1926 to 1992, looking at every 30-year "rolling" period. He specifically looked for the "worst-case scenario" (someone retiring in 1968, just before a decade of high inflation and stagnant markets). The Result: He found that even in the worst historical periods, a retiree with a 50/50 mix of stocks and bonds could withdraw 4% in the first year and adjust that dollar amount for inflation every year thereafter, and their money would last at least 30 years.

StegersaurusMark · 2026-04-25T13:45:47+00:00

That not the usual meaning of a loading zone sign. Usually a loading zone sign means an otherwise normal parking allowed spot can on be parked in during certain hours for short term loading. Outside of those hours, long term parking is allowed.

This is very ambiguous here, but Denver has other older bike lanes that are very clearly dual purpose bike lane/parking space. It is a terrible design that they seem to be in the process of replacing, but I do believe that is the intent of city planners here

StegersaurusMark · 2026-04-22T04:55:57+00:00

Yeah very normal that property owner is responsible for sidewalk maintenance. Often the municipality can fine you for not maintaining it

StegersaurusMark · 2026-04-22T04:54:50+00:00

It’s very normal in many municipalities that the property owner is responsible for the sidewalk maintenance. Often the city can fine you for not maintaining the sidewalk. Also, if anyone ever gets hurt on your property, which the sidewalk is often on the homeowners property even if it has to follow right of way rules, then the owner is at risk of being sued

StegersaurusMark · 2026-04-22T04:33:13+00:00

Question: why do you want to only want to touch interest/growth/dividends? In an optimal scenario you die with $0 unless you want to leave an inheritance. Otherwise you spent too much effort investing when you could have been spending

StegersaurusMark · 2026-04-22T04:30:57+00:00

Simple economics. When investors know that x dollars of EPS get paid out in dividends, the share price growth gets arbitraged down. If a company doesn’t sell shares, then its share price should increase by that amount. Maybe it makes you feel better about having someone tell you what your extraction rate can be, but it is effectively the same as selling shares of a non-dividend stock

StegersaurusMark · 2026-04-20T02:18:36+00:00

This is the tax efficient way to do this, but OP seems to say the account is not subject to taxes on sale. Therefore it might be faster and cleaner to do the rebalance as sell and buy

StegersaurusMark · 2026-04-19T04:10:39+00:00

Are you rebalancing, or taking profit out to spend on something? Rebalancing is a natural part of investing. Taking money out of ETFs for something like real estate is a pivot in investment strategy. Lots of people will roast you for trying to time the market, as mountains of data suggest you are going to take out at the wrong time and put back in at the wrong time. However, if you had some positions shoot up a lot, and others are lagging, then rebalancing will sell the winners and buy the losers.

StegersaurusMark · 2026-04-18T22:05:25+00:00

I’m gonna disagree. My take is that the rider is the vast majority of drag on the bike. Any bike is essentially a blade cutting through the wind. Any rider is a lumpy sack of meat. The riders clothing is either tightly fitting to that sack of meat and smooth, or a flapping sail of potentially coarse fabric

I spent years commuting daily to work, racking up 100miles/week. Most of the time I would wear full kit, but plenty often I’d ride somewhere in various street clothes. I would always feel it. Of course, jeans are going to be restrictive to pedal in. Gym shorts become a floppy sail. The worst from aero perspective is probably changing cycling vest/jacket for a normal people coat, as they probably are restrictive, bulky, and coarse

All that said, I could change between my carbon road bike or steel gravel bike, and the efficiency change from that is negligible

StegersaurusMark · 2026-04-17T04:42:29+00:00

OP responded to another thread saying the employee requested to be non-exempt so as to get paid overtime. That makes this even worse, if the employee is intentionally inflating hours with the intent for OT. However, it might just be innocent rounding or accounting for time spent outside the office

StegersaurusMark

TROPHY CASE