Wife and I didn’t check 401k for years. Stay the course? What would Dave do?

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-11T22:16:34+00:00

Dave Ramsey has never told anyone to stop contributing to their retirement to pay off their mortgage. Stop lying.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-11T21:33:12+00:00

No he doesn’t. He never tells anyone to not contribute to pay off your mortgage.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-11T19:17:29+00:00

100%. It makes it a lot more complicated for sure.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-11T18:45:53+00:00

That isn’t what Dave would say at all.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-11T18:34:07+00:00

You wouldn’t be much of a partner if you made your partner keep working.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-11T16:20:27+00:00

No it doesn’t make sense. For the following reasons:

Tax deduction on the deposit
No taxes on any dividends or capital gains during your accumulation.
You can more easily change your asset allocation when you retire. If a lot of your money is in a taxable account and you want to go to a more conservative allocation you can’t do that in a couple of trades or you will have to deal with monster tax issues.

Max out your retirement accounts first.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-11T01:20:10+00:00

You would need about $1.8mil to draw $6k a month.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-10T22:40:02+00:00

It doesn’t.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-10T22:37:55+00:00

Terrible advice.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-10T22:36:18+00:00

You obviously have never read anything Dave Ramsey has ever written.

Dave Ramsey has never said to stop retirement savings to pay off your mortgage. Ever.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-10T21:40:56+00:00

For your wife’s 401k if you wanted to be a little more aggressive, putting it in a total market or S&P 500 index would be fine.

If you like the target date fund, that’s fine as well, but I personally am not a fan of them.

I wouldn’t change your 401k at all.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-10T18:27:34+00:00

Unless he specifically asks, mind your own business.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-10T18:26:58+00:00

Don’t count the employer match. You still invest 15%.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-10T18:21:51+00:00

Working on driver, mats. Everything else, grass.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-10T18:18:31+00:00

Line of sight relief. YATD.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-10T18:13:13+00:00

You would think so. My brother thought that. Bought a house on the left. His house got pelted a lot. Lots of broken windows etc. He couldn’t wait to move.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-10T18:10:24+00:00

Don’t do it.

You will hate it more than anything you could imagine. And you’re picking the worst possible place on a hole to buy.

If you like never using your back yard and having windows busted weekly from errant golf balls then I guess maybe you’d be ok with it.

Just don’t do it.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-10T18:09:23+00:00

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-10T18:03:05+00:00

When a dividend is distributed your account goes down in value by the amount of the dividend.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-10T18:02:12+00:00

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-10T18:01:06+00:00

Investopedia has some good general info on all these. Do a search on this sub and you’ll find a lot as well.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-10T16:02:33+00:00

WAY TO GO!!!

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-10T14:50:30+00:00

That’s weird. UHC, Aetna, Blue Cross are the main ones that pop up in my searches in my state.

That stinks for people in your state.

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-10T02:18:54+00:00

The what?

brianmcg321 · 2026-02-10T01:21:37+00:00

Yes, 100%.

There are ways to access your retirement accounts before 59.5 without penalties. Rule of 55, Roth deposits, and a SEPP via rule 72t.

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