IRAs: They can make you want to rollover

Host Matt Robison asks me this week about his rollover IRA. In an enlightening episode for us both, you will learn the ins and outs of Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) including the different types, rollovers, and the strategic moves you can make to optimize the tax benefits of these accounts. While I’d have thought the answers were all in the name, it turns out IRAs are not nearly as intuitive as I believed them to be.

Individual Retirement Account: IRA

There are many different types of IRAs, from rollover to Roth, traditional to back door, and everything in between. The one key thing to remember is that they all share a common thread—they end in ‘IRA.’ Each Individual Retirement Account comes with its own set of rules for things like transfers, withdrawals, and contributions, and has its own tax implications. We’ve gone over these in previous episodes, such as the Clean Back Door IRA, Traditional vs. Roth, 529 to Roth, and the oldie but goodie SEP-IRA vs. Solo 401k.

Consolides IRAs and 401(k) for Simplicity

In this episode, Matt shares his personal experience of rolling over an IRA from one financial institution to another. Seems like it would be a straightforward process, right? Not exactly. First, we talk about the challenges Matt faced as he attempted to ensure a successful rollover and then we dive into the importance of careful consideration when managing accounts tied to previous employers. 

So, where to begin? Consider consolidating multiple IRAs into a single rollover IRA for simplicity and ease of management. Do you have previous employer retirement accounts such as a 401(k) or 403(b)? You could also transfer those funds into one account so that you can maintain centralized control over older, tax-deferred funds. But be careful: there are reasons to leave them in that 401(k)! So make sure to consider the consequences (Clean Back Door Roth)

Tax Benefits

Speaking of taxes, IRAs are designed to give you tax benefits. That is why putting savings into these accounts, versus your checking, savings, and brokerage accounts is so important. Decide how much liquidity you need (for instance, an emergency fund) then put the rest in a place where it will make you more money. 

What place is that? Grab your employee handbook and figure out your options. Employer benefits are often overlooked but usually offer excellent ways to make the most from your savings. Google your yearly contribution limits for IRAs. They vary by age and by year, so once you have the info you need, make the transfer. If you are just starting this process, you can look up your 2023 contribution limits and those for 2024 and fund both accounts before April 15, 2024 (tax day). Then, set a calendar reminder for Q1 2025 to get ahead of your IRA funding and be sure you aren’t missing opportunities. 

The bottom line is that IRAs are a great place to put your savings because of the many tax advantages. With a little bit of homework, you can make a lot more from your savings than leaving it sitting in accounts with no real benefits. 

You're a problem.

Thanks for giving me the problem, Mike how about you tell me how to fix it. I'm Matt Robeson. It's financial life planning. With Mike Morton, Mike, you're really good at laying out some problems that people might run into and then really, really good at giving some bread crumbs. Hey, I have solutions here. Today, we're gonna find a loaf, or at least a slice, because we were talking a few weeks ago about solving a certain kind of problem that I think a lot of our listeners probably run into and that led me to text you over the weekend, or maybe it was Friday, led me to text you. Hey, Mike, is a rollover IRA, an IRA, and I'm promising you we're going somewhere with this, can I continue to add money to an IRA? And let's answer that question. And then let's tell people where we're going with us.

You know what, I think even you could answer that question. Is a rollover IRA an IRA? It’s in the name.

Yes, but that doesn't mean the answers in the name because what you're doing in the name and account that used to be an IRA, you're transferring it out of that, if you have a rollover, 401k, and you're taking it out of an account you used to have when it moves to a different institution is it still the same thing?

All right, hold on, stop. Wait, you know what? You know what, Matt, stop talking. You're confusing yourself and all the listeners with all your jargon. Alright. Love it. Okay, let's break it down. Is a rollover IRA, an IRA? Yes. The hint is in the name, Matt. It's a rollover IRA it is an IRA. Okay, that's step one. It's an IRA. That wasn't really your question. Your question was, can I contribute to my rollover IRA, that was your second question.

Hold on, no, no, no, no, this is a trap. If people assume this is based on, well, it's got IRA in the name, you could easily be wrong. It doesn't guarantee to me that it's going to have the same tax treatment once you roll over from one institution to another. Does that mean that this has I understand that it's a tax deferred account when you initially made contributions to it but if I make future, I'm really asking about his future contributions. But that's the critical point. If I go along, just assuming that if I make further contributions to this rollover IRA that they're going to have this tax deferred status, I could be wrong, and I could cost myself a lot of money. This is a big deal.

All right, that's true. That is true. But again, you're very confusing, Matt, because you're saying words like tax deferred, and rollover IRA, those aren't the same things. Your rollover IRA, if it's a traditional IRA, then yes, it is tax deferred. But if it's a Roth IRA, it's tax free. So we really have to break it down.

Wait, are you saying that just because it has the word IRA in it, it's not intuitively obvious? I see.

No, if it has the word IRA in it, it is an IRA. That's my point. Rollover, IRA, Roth IRA, Sep IRA, simple IRA, they all end in IRA. They're all IRAs. Now, what can you do with them? Or are they tax deferred? Are they tax free? Can I transfer it? Can I withdraw from it? Can I contribute to it? All right, more questions, but they're all about IRA is the hint, it’s is in the name.

I still think you're kind of missing it, though. It's great that it's like I contributed a few thousand, I mean, we're not talking about a large account here. But like, once upon a time, I created an IRA with a certain financial institution. And per one of our shows that we did, maybe a year ago, I decided, I have way too many accounts, I do have way too many accounts. And this is a common problem for a lot of people you have different jobs so you can end up with different 401K's if you live in different places. So maybe it makes sense at a certain point to open up an account with a local financial advisor who is attached to a certain institution, and then you move. That's what happened to us. We were attached to a financial institution, someone we knew who was in an office, like next door to me, someone I could work with, that was important to me, then we moved to an entirely different state. This no longer makes sense. So I rolled over this IRA that had I mean, literally, it's not a lot of money. It's a few thousand bucks, okay. And I successfully went through all of the pain in the ass you know steps which by the way, do not make it easy. It's like it's easier to quit the gym, I promise you. So I managed to roll over to the new financial institution I was now using and now I've got this rollover IRA account, it goes up whenever I look at the dashboard in my institution, and it's just been sitting there, it's never invested in. But the question was, would this, is this still a functional account that I can add to and we'll get the same tax treatment that it had in my old institution? I don't think that's intuitively obvious.

That question is not intuitively obvious. I totally agree with you. Great question that is not an IRA? Yes. Okay. Now, how can you use this if you want to contribute money in 2023 to a traditional IRA, I wouldn't use your rollover IRA, I would open up a new traditional IRA. And it's not that shy. Oh, yeah.

Why would I open up yet another account?

Another one, I know, it's because I find it easier to keep track of where what the accounts are and what they're used for your rollover IRA, you could, I would roll everything, that's a previous episode, this is the way I recommend it, everything that's a previous money, that's tax deferred into a single rollover IRA. So you have a rollover IRA, great, you have a rollover IRA, you only need one of those. If you have a previous say, Matt, you worked at a job 10 years ago, and you have a 401k with 10,000 bucks in it from that job. You could transfer, let's use the word transfer the money from your 401 k into your rollover IRA, and you can use the same rollover IRA. And therefore what you told me earlier is Mike, this money is old money that I rolled over. Okay, great. Let's use the rollover IRA, it's really easy to know what's in there with old money, let's make it all tax deferred. And it's in the rollover IRA. So if you have a couple of, I worked at this job for a while. I worked at this job for a while. I got $10,000 in this 401k, $15,000 in this 401k, you could put them all into the same rollover IRA.

I see. Okay, so what you're saying is, let's say I'm now at a large financial institution that rhymes with Ganvard. And I get to my dashboard, and I see I've got a brokerage account, I've got a rollover IRA, I've got an account in there that represents something from my employer, currently. All right, what you're saying is, yes, I know it's a little annoying when you look at your dashboard to have one more account show up. That might be a teeny tiny bit more confusion, but you actually think it's net less confusion because what I'm going to do is I have previous employment 401K's, my wife has previous employment 401k's and we're gonna use this one as a rollover.

No, your wife can't use your rollover IRA. She needs her own. You don't need another account, she needs another account.

But this is a feature here as well. I want to be able to look at everything on one dashboard. I put a lot of work with Ganvard into signing a lot of documents so that I could log in once and everything was comprehensive.

So you might be able to get view access to her rollover IRA, but it's going to be hers. Remember that? Remember, the I in IRA is individual. Okay, so it's per individual. So you can't mix those. But the answer is yes, she's got some old 401k, you got some old 401K's you could put them into, you could transfer the money from an old 401k into your IRA, your 401K that's owned by an individual, and you can transfer into your rollover IRA.

You should have your rollover IRA somewhere that you never look at it. Why do you, if love the TSP because it's well allocated. You should have your rollover IRA somewhere you only look at once a year. IWhy would you say 'm making this generalized for the listeners, because I'm not going to take Mike's advice. What would you say something like that? That’s terrible.

Because my idiosyncratic situation does not apply to those people. Whereas I think about the situation of having some previous jobs, I have a 401k. Over here, my 401K…

I gotcha. All right.

Let’s get back to the track here.

Yeah let’s get back to the track. Let's wait. But I do want to get back. But also TSP, lots of people have TSPs, just briefly, I said, you could roll it to a roll, you could transfer it to a rollover IRA, you could do that. Often, I recommend leaving it in the TSP. Love the Thrift Savings Plan, leaving the TSP, that's great. So don't, you know, immediately run out and think you need to do that transfer.

Oh, wait, before, wait before you do that. Yeah, let me jump in. I love that. If you're already in a hole, stop digging. That's great. However, if you're saving money automatically, don't turn that off. Okay people, Matt didn't hear what he said. He didn't turn off the automatic savings. He moved it somewhere else. Okay, so let's just get that straight.

That's a different kind of hole. You know, it's like, it's like in, uh, Indiana Jones, and the Holy Grail. It's like your situation has not improved if you're in the revolving door that takes you from one fireplace to the other.

That's right. That's right. So don't, if you have automatic savings, don't stop them. I love automatic savings. Save the money. But here what Matt said, it was I'm automatically saving money into my brokerage account, which is what we call a taxable account. So all your savings there are taxed every year, the interest, the dividends, and capital gains are all taxed every year. What we'd like to do is, if possible, save as much money into tax deferred tax free. These accounts that give you a boost, an extra savings by not paying taxes in some way. Okay? So don't keep the automatic savings, but evaluate your situation. Am I maxing out, education's important to me, am I really looking at 529s? Am I looking at my employer retirement accounts? We started with IRAs of, am I maxing out what I can do in IRAs? Look at all those different areas where you would get a tax break, a tax savings, and the final one is the brokerage account. Okay. While looking at all those things, so that's…

And that’s actually no, that's a great distinction you're making because we did talk about that in the episode, people can just go back and listen to it. Yeah, we did talk about that, that very first step is, you know, you can pick a lease, stop digging, but that is kind of important is like first, you know, start getting your savings flowing into these.

And I'll say this in fact, first, so you're thinking, now you're thinking mentally, am I doing this? You know what you need to do next, Matt? Step two. Go, if you are at an employer go get their benefits package that big PDF, that's 30 pages and read it, okay? That will give you hints on more places that you can shove money away and save more in taxes. So do that as step two. Read your benefits. I, for all my clients Matt. I read the benefits and I'm always finding Hey, did you know you you could contribute after-tax to your 401k? Did you know you have a deferred 457 plan? I just find these things that are, that these employers offer and people aren't taking advantage of 'em, so please go do that.

I, no, I'm glad you said that is a critical pivot point in the rescue plan and you know, step one is super important because I'm 49. Gosh, I love saying that. I'm 49. You know what was awesome. All right, quick diversion. You know what was really awesome? When I see my own face it's in the mirror. You know, like most normal humans, I don't have 360 degree vision and sometimes I see myself on Zoom or squad cast, wherever we record these shows. And so when I see myself from the front, I've got, I've got a nice little white patch, kind of like, you know, corner right on my head and I've got a lot of gray. But the way the coloration shows up. I still see a lot of brown in my hair. Here's the thing, I also coach a basketball team and we were in a scrimmage and this team we were playing against had shelled out for one of these awesome super high mounted 360 degree cameras to record the game and I got the feed from the opposing coach. It was pretty awesome. And the point is, it's a downward angle on my head. You know what I found out, Mike? My hair is fricking white on top. No one told me this. I was completely unaware of it.

Luckily, Matt, there's not a lot of 10 foot tall people walking around looking down at you to let you know.

You know what the problem is is that they're all in my family. No, you know, the thing is, I married into a super tall family. And so like we have so many nephews and cousins and whatnot that are six, five and above, they all knew this, they'd like to be like, oh shoot that the situation is bad. The point is, I'm 49. So if you find yourself in this situation where you know you have built up money in a brokerage account or a non-good tax situation, it can be a long rescue. And we'll get into that. But like the very first step, I've still got, hopefully, you know, a couple of decades of working life ahead of me. So I have a significant amount of time to build up those tax preferred savings. And starting now is a good step. And then I have a great opportunity if my kids manage to get into college to expand a lot of those. And then your point, too, is super important to make sure you've found all the nooks and crannies. But that kind of leads us right to point three, which is you were telling me offline, that there's a big distinction. If you've got a lot of money in a brokerage account. A lot can mean a different thing: a lot is doing a lot of work in that sense. What's the distinction there?

Yeah. So you definitely want money, here's the distinction. Yeah, you would definitely want money in a brokerage account. You're checking, let's lump 'em together. Your checking account, your savings account, and your brokerage account. These are all taxable accounts, and what's nice about them, the huge benefit is that you can just go and grab that money and spend it.

If you need to, it's just sitting right there. You're checking and savings, you already know that. But the same in your brokerage. You could just sell some investments or you have cash sitting in there and you can just spend it tomorrow. Oh my gosh. Massive problem with the roof on my house I need to spend money, so you can just spend that money. So that's what's great. All these other accounts, eh, there's gotchas, right? You're 49, Matt. You can't really touch these other accounts. All right, so your 401Ks, your IRAs, your TSP, there's all problems. If you try to pull that money out tomorrow, you're actually gonna owe taxes, penalties, potentially, stuff like that. So they're more locked away for retirement that's the whole idea.

I asked you a question about that. Yeah, because I think this may be one of the ways I got fooled. Okay. Yeah. When I put the money into a brokerage account, I was given the option to invest it in a target date fund that's in the brokerage account. Is it something aligned with my retirement age? A target, although I should cheat it, I should share your other advice. It's in a target date fund, which means it's invested. So if I want that money as liquid as I think it is, because it's invested, I would pay capital gains.

Yes. So here's, yeah. You have two problems, Matt, in your brokerage account, which is a taxable account, you should not use target date funds. Don't you remember that episode from a year ago? So if you're listening now, and you have a brokerage account with target date funds, you can leave it, of course, cause you'll have tax gains or capital gains if you try to switch it.

But in general, we don't like to use target date funds in taxable accounts now if you do have one, you really want the ETF version, not the mutual fund version. You can go back and listen to some of those episodes, mutual funds versus ETFs. So that's your first problem, Matt. But you know what? That's okay and then… Fine. You are doing great because your investments have made money. You know your second problem is yes, you're going to get a capital gain if you sell it. Oh, boohoo, you made money and you owe a little bit in taxes or you could have just left it in cash,

I'm just saying I was just trying to, because you were lumping together, saving or sinking and brokerage is good, but they're not necessarily all quite as liquid as, as the others.

No, I would say this, they are all liquid. Okay. Most people tend to think of their brokerage as for the future, I'm investing. They think of their checking and savings as everyday money, direct deposit, I'm paying off the credit cards. And the brokerage account is oh, that's for emergencies or the future. If it's for emergencies of the future, please go ahead and invest it. Target date fund, just use a total stock market fund or whatever. Please go ahead and invest it because it's unlikely you're going to use it. It's there in case you have an emergency or if you need it. But the whole point is you've set it aside thinking, ah, I probably won't need this, so yes, please invest that brokerage money and have it grow if you do need it. If you have an emergency you sell it and you spend it, it's just as liquid, it's just as available. The only problem is you might have to pay capital gains, which is a good problem because you made money. It was great that you invested in it. Congratulations. The worst part is if it goes down, you invest it, and then a year later you need it and it goes down by 20%. Okay? But again, hey, if you still have it, you sell it, you still have 80% of whatever you put in there, and you can go ahead and spend it for whatever you need. So they're all very available and that's the big benefit of checking, savings and brokerage accounts. Now, you asked the question, okay, how much is a lot, when do we start thinking about this? It's really up to you. How much do you need in an emergency, you want to have enough in your checking, savings, and brokerage to feel very comfortable. For a lot of people, that might be a total of $50,000. Just throwing that out there. Hey, with $50,000 between my checking and saving and my brokerage account, I feel like I can handle emergencies. My job's pretty stable. Like I don't expect to have problems. And 50 grand seems like enough to always be on tap, always ready just in case, something comes up. So that could be enough. So if you're in the tens of thousands, I definitely recommend having that amount in your checking, saving, and brokerage. Once you get into the hundreds of thousands in your checking, saving, and brokerage account, or your brokerage account, hundreds of thousands, there's where hey, we should really save in some of these other vehicles because you will save more in taxes. Are you ready to create your ideal lifestyle? Let's discover what's most important to you and design a plan to have more of that in your life. Go to meet Mike morton.com all one word meet Mike morton.com taxes

Right, and you know, it's interesting because like I said, I established this years ago and I made that fundamental original mistake oh, I'm gonna put this in this fund this is my retirement, and I didn't, I did accrue enough that, you know, I do treat it to be clear, I do treat the brokerage account as I agree with you if there were an emergency in our family, of course I could sell it and use that money, it is not locked up I wouldn’t have to go through a special step, right? There's no tax penalty for use. If it's an emergency, of course you can do that but like, it's just a, it's a capital gain, a tax, but it's not like, you know, it's still as you said, there's a gain. There's still the funds there, but I have, because I've been contributing to it for years, it has now grown to a size where it’s really like a long-term and so that's kind of where I wanted to go next, so. Bringing this around full circle. Our jumping off point was, I texted you and I'm I've got this rollover IRA and I'm starting to try the rescue process. You know, can I use this as my IRA going forward? We've gone through that. The answer is you could, your advice in general for most people is just to start keeping better track. Okay. Fair enough. The next thing I did was kind of like the first step, I'm going to stop transferring to the fund, I'm going to start putting things in a 529. My savings that we're able to make every month is going to 529 I just want to tell people that one of the aspects of that rescue plan episode we did was how long is it going to take to do this? Each step, you have to plan for like an hour. And this first step of just, I want to stop transferring to Vanguard, I want to start transferring to Fidelity, it seems like it should be easy. It is not easy, it's not. , you have to go and stop the transfer, which means you have to find layers deep like the click depth on the Vanguard site is really regrettable, and then because it's so hard to both find and manage, you know what I ended up doing? I ended up keeping a minimal amount getting transferred every month just so that I wouldn't have to start something up all over again from scratch, because I might not be able to find this again.

Again, but you're never going to be able to turn that small amount of money is going to be forever now, you're never going to find it again.

Which is fine, you know, and so then I went over to Fidelity and I, I navigated through. It was not much easier. I navigated through, I had a set transfer going there and I wanted to increase it, and I eventually found the screen clicked on it, and I set the new amounts and it gave me an error screen. ‘You have to select a symbol and you have to select an account’. There was no option for doing that, there was no dropdown, there was no nothing, so I had to deal with the chatbot who tried to prove that I was a human and kept trying to nudge me toward, let me bot you the answer, which of course it didn't have the answer. So then I got to a human and they were like, oh Yeah, it’s glitch in the system. Yeah, no kidding it was a glitch in the system. She said, let me just do it for you and she did the change for me. So that's lovely. The point is the whole thing probably took me about 30 to 40 minutes start to finish, but it's done now. I've done that step. So that was the accomplishment for last week. And then by texting you, I was setting up what will now be the next step for this week, which is either establishing or starting to transfer to this existing IRA account.

Yeah. Here's the great part about the IRAs too. So that's great, Matt so glad you made it through there and came out the other end. Now we're going to do, now we're going to do IRAs. First of all, for most listeners, again, keep your automatic savings going to the brokerage, okay? Because most people, the 529's great, and you can set up some automatic savings there as well, or switch it around. But for the IRA, here's the problem you're going to run into Matt. I don't actually recommend setting up automatic transfers every month to your IRA. Now, I do recommend every year contributing to an IRA, so in the example before, hey, you have a few hundred thousand, you realize you're in this problem. Hey, I've saved too much money in my brokerage account. There's a few hundred thousand there, a few low hanging fruits. Make sure you're contributing to an IRA every year, okay? That will save you tens of thousand dollars in taxes over your lifetime. Tens of thousands. Okay. No brainer. So your IRA, the problem is they keep changing it every year how much you can contribute. So if I tell you today to do 500 a month, that gets you the 6,000. That was last year's and now that's 6,500 this year and it's 7,000 next year . So it's a different monthly amount every year. So this is why often what I say is save it automatically in your brokerage. So Matt, for you, save it automatically. You have to dig down in Vanguard and find it again and get more money going there. Save it automatically throughout the year, at least 7,000 a year, and then once a year do a contribution to your IRA.

So this is exactly where I was going to kind of wind this up so my next step is to take $7,000 from my brokerage account and put it into either a newly established or my existing rollover IRA. And that's it but to be clear, because the entirety of my brokerage account is invested in a target date fund. I am going to have a capital gain associated with that. So it is not a lossless transaction. However, long term, the thinking is that even if I'm paying a capital gain as I do this, I'm still better off long term when I eventually need those IRA funds, because they will have been growing in this tax deferred account 100%.

A hundred percent what you just said. So even though you have a capital gain, do it, sell it, pay the capital gain, and then put the money into your IRA. Now here's what you're going to do, Matt. We're at the end of the year. You're going to do this early next year. You can do both the 2023 contributions lookup, do a Google search max contribution to an IRA 2023. It'll tell you the right amount. And then if you're under 50 , like you, or if you're over 50, there's a different amount. Okay? So that's why I did a quick Google search. Confirm 2023 contribution. You could do it up until tax filing time, so do it early in the year. And if you can, if you're in Matt's situation, I'll recommend it to Matt. Do your 2024 contribution at the same time during the first quarter of 2024. So you're going to do both 2023 and 2024 all at the same time while you're already on the screens, doing the selling and putting the money in. So you can do both contributions and then set a reminder for a year later to do it during the first quarter of every year.

Well, there we go. Alright, so I have my homework, but I will say that, you know, final thought on this, even though it was a pain in the butt to do this just just to redo the transfer part, even though that was a pain in the butt, it was time well spent, it was money well spent. It was like a dollars per hour basis. It was a good investment of time. It was annoying I had to deal with bots. I had to prove my essential humanity. I don't love having to do that because I'm not confident about it. Um, but it got done and I was satisfied with it. And, you know, look, now I'm starting. The long process of future funds are going into, a better tax situation set of accounts, and I'm going to start the very long rescue process for the funds I do have. So I am on the road, and if you chunk it out a little bit at a time, it is doable.

You, Matt, just by these couple of small changes, you literally saved yourself tens of thousands of dollars without a doubt. I'm telling you, I've run the numbers over, the next 10, 20, 30 years that they're sitting in these accounts, tens of thousands of dollars for, that small quote unquote, small amount of pain. Now, here's the good news and the teaser for our next episode, or one coming up soon. This is step one, step zero, step one and step two. But I told you to look at your benefits package and you're going to go and do that. And you're going to find, you can do after-tax 401k contributions, you're going to find, you have a 457 deferred comp plan. You're going to find you got bonuses and RSUs and stock options that are vesting every year. Now we have a lot more things to continue talking about. And you're saying you find oh yeah, my brokerage account, for my RSUs and stock options and other stuff is, yeah. A few hundreds of thousands, so my friend, we need to take advantage of what's in your benefits package. Matt, you and I can talk more about that in the future.

Right. Well, on that note, we will talk more about that in the future. From Mike Morton to Matt Robison. We will see you next time.

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