Direct Roth IRA contributions phase out once your income crosses a set line, but the backdoor Roth IRA gives high earners a legal way around that limit — contribute to a traditional IRA with after-tax money, then convert it to a Roth, with no income cap involved in the conversion step itself. It’s written into … Read more
If choosing investments feels like the part of retirement saving you keep putting off, a target-date fund is built to be the one decision that replaces all the others — you pick a single fund named for the year you plan to retire, and everything else it holds and how it shifts over time is … Read more
If you’re looking at your brokerage account right now and wincing at a position that’s worth less than what you paid for it, tax-loss harvesting is the one piece of good news buried in that bad number — it’s the strategy that turns a paper loss into an actual tax break, and late in the … Read more
Robo-advisor vs financial advisor is a harder call than it looks once you realize most of what’s written on it isn’t really talking to a beginner. If you’re starting with a few thousand dollars rather than a few hundred thousand, the typical breakdown runs the numbers on a $100,000 or $500,000 portfolio, which makes the … Read more
2027 401k contribution limit projections just got a fresh update, and it landed only days ago: Milliman, the actuarial firm whose forecasts have closely tracked the IRS’s actual announcements in past years, updated its estimate on September 14, 2026 using real Consumer Price Index data through August. Their call is that the employee deferral limit … Read more
401k millionaires just hit a record high — Fidelity counted 769,000 accounts worth $1 million or more as of June 30, 2026, up 19% from the previous quarter alone. That headline sounds like pure good news, but a $1 million traditional 401(k) balance isn’t actually worth $1 million once the IRS’s eventual cut is factored … Read more
Is an HSA worth it for retirement, or is it really just a checking account for doctor bills? The IRS’s newly announced 2026 limits let individuals contribute $4,400 to a health savings account and families contribute $8,750, plus an extra $1,000 catch-up for anyone 55 or older — and unlike a Flexible Spending Account, every … Read more
Is a 401k hardship withdrawal worth it, or is the paperwork hiding a much bigger cost than the balance you see on the screen? Fidelity’s Q2 2026 retirement analysis found average account balances at a record high — $155,800 in the average 401(k), up 10% from the first quarter — but a growing share of … Read more
Do index fund fees really matter, or is a 0.5-percentage-point difference too small to worry about? According to the Investment Company Institute’s 2026 report on fund expenses, the average index equity mutual fund now charges just 0.05% a year, while the average actively managed equity fund charges 0.64% — a gap that looks tiny as … Read more
Is it normal to take a 401(k) loan, or does reaching into retirement savings mean something’s gone wrong? A new report released this week by Fidelity says both things are true at once. The average 401(k) balance hit $155,800 in the second quarter of 2026, up 13% from a year earlier, and the average IRA … Read more