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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Maybe if you assume healthcare stays as-is, you may be able to use roths to keep your taxable-income low enough to stay under the magic number required to get the deductible/max year out of pocket savings and the potentially ~$4000s of dollars a year savings in health care costs.

    Numbers:
    Hypothetical case: need 30K/year after taxes if getting the MYOP savings or 34K/year after taxes if not and assuming you put in all your money now and wait 30 years to retire using 5% average returns. Assume 4% WR and 27K is the threshold for extra savings. All numbers adjusted for inflation.

    t401k:
    Need ~213k now -> 921k in 30 years (which would be ~850k after taxes on the gains)
    r401k:
    Need 193k now if marginal tax rate is 10%, 197k if marginal tax rate is 12% -> 750k (no taxes paid on the gains)
    Mixed (you only need to 3k/year from roth to bring taxable income down to threshold):
    169K into t401k + 19-20k into r401k (10 and 12% marginal tax rates) = 189k now.

    Another easy case is when the current marginal tax is 0%. If you are putting money into retirement accounts when your income is under the standard deduction, then definitely Roth. Traditional literally does nothing in that case.

    Of course this is a bit of a contrived example and it assumes you have the same 10-12% marginal tax rate on either side. I think most people who have the extra income to for it to be worth the time to consider the difference probably make enough now to be in higher brackets, but probably will retire with significantly lower spending than their current income. If taxes across brackets increase in the future, otoh, then paying them now would be beneficial and may give some peace of mind about that risk.

    There’s so many unknowns that I think its a bit oversimplistic to assume one is simply better than the other.