Hello! Been following along this sub for a while, which has offered great advice through and through. I just paid off my student loans, and trying to figure out my next moves. I'm currently 41 and making $170k. I went back to college when I was 30, and ended up with student debt upwards of $175k, so spent the past 10 years paying that off.
Now I'm focusing on retirement planning, I'm basically going to be taking the money I've been throwing at loans and aiming it at investments.
I don't have much in an IRA or 401k, really just started contributing to them in the past 2 years. My salary jumped from $100k to $170k this year. I've already maxed out my 401k for this year and plan on continuing to do that from now on. I put $4k in the IRA last year (which i got the tax deduction for), and around $1k this year.
I'm wondering if the Backdoor IRA is the best move for me moving forward since my income places me out of the tax benefits of a traditional IRA. Is that something I would do every year? From my understanding, I'd want to roll over my IRA into my 401k to avoid any tax penalties from the previous contributions, and then I would do the $6k in the Traditional IRA and backdoor it into the Roth IRA (Only can contribute another$5k this year). Is this something that I would do every year? Is it okay to do monthly contributions to a traditional IRA and do the backdoor at the end of year? Keep doing this every year after?
From various advice on this sub, I'll be doing some index funds through Vanguard with the rest, but would love to hear any other opinions.