What do you invest your savings in? Forum

[polareagle]

I do a lot of what nealric says. Almost all my investments are with Vanguard. After bonus season, I fund a traditional IRA in January and then backdoor it to Roth a few weeks later. I set 401k contributions to be pretty high (max that out by april) and dump extra money into a taxable Vanguard brokerage account.

I thought you just had to convert a traditional IRA account to backdoor Roth once and that's it (i.e. future contributions will be Roth contributions)? Are you implying that after you contribute each year, you have to separately backdoor that contribution annually? Or am I misunderstanding?

There's a HHI limitation on contributing to a Roth IRA ($139,000 in Modified AGI for a single person in 2020). There's no limitation on contributing to a non-tax deductible traditional IRA. There's also no income limitation on converting funds in a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA. So if you have a high income but want to contribute to a Roth IRA, each year you contribute after tax to a traditional IRA and then immediately convert it to Roth.

ETA: This process becomes more complex if you aggregate pre-tax and post-tax funds in your traditional IRA. Please read up on all the steps and complexities before doing this in order to avoid tax consequences.

[showusyourtorts]

So, do biglaw firms typically allow the type of 401k plan that allows for MBDR? Are people taking advantage of them here?

Clifford Chance allows us to contribute $10K on top of the standard $19.5K.

My biglaw firm allows for the full MBDR (i.e., up to the 37k). I’ve asked a few friends that are scattered among v50 firms and it’s about 50/50 on whether their plans allow for it.

[Pulsar]

Unless I'm crazy (I've done this for a couple years), you have to perform the backdoor each year. You always have to first plop it in the traditional ira, and then convert to a roth one.