TED74

What can you tell from this? People have savings all over the place, some have pensions (military), some have 6 or 7-figure equity in real estate, some have spouses with 6 or 7-figure retirement accounts and some have 6 or 7 wives counting on alimony.

It would seem that there are much better ways to plan for retirement?

BobZ

Yup. Going forward is a different landscape than in the past.

Self direcected is a wide open opportunity now.

Not so for much of the last 30yrs of a delta pilot career.

Some of us were compelled to build a plan outside of self directed because of the extreme disadvantage of past circumstances.

A significant component of my retirement security and net worth is income property.

gloopy

Not everything, but that's why its an average. There's some value in that and I can't see a downside.

TED74

Ok. I honestly can't see the upside, and the downside is that one might think an average depiction of inky a portion of others' financial picture has bearing on their own plan. How is this better than comparing one's own retirement assets against any number of professionally-recommended milestones/strategies?

There are 3-year pilots who are 29, and 3-year pilots who are 59. At both extremes, some have millions in savings as others have zero (which wouldn't be in this data). What is one to do with that info?

I just can't see how such a report offers more help than reading something like this in 2 minutes:

https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/retirement/you-need-this-much-retirement-savings-at-your-age-and-income/

Jughead135

Did it. PITA, but not truly "hard," aside from the information gathering. Do you have a sizable tax-exempt balance in your TSP? That's why I rolled mine over--to get that money into a Roth. Since you can't rollover just the tax-exempt portion, I closed the whole thing. Otherwise, as others have noted, the TSP has about the best cost structure you'll find, so unless you want to expand beyond the limited options it has, you may wish to stay put.

Rollover into TSP was a paperwork exercise, made painful by TSP rules (need multiple notarization, to include your spouse saying it's OK (and it doesn't matter if you were married all, part, or none of the time you contributed to the TSP).

Once that's done, rolling the money out into IRAs (plural) is easy enough--once again, you have to roll ALL of it to get all of the after-tax money, so after-tax goes into a Roth IRA, pre-tax goes into a traditional IRA. Rolling the traditional IRA (to which you just rolled all of the pre-tax portion) right back into the DPSP will let you use (continue to use) the "back door" Roth IRA. (Note, if you intend to do this and have any pre-tax money lying around in traditional IRA(s), now would be the right time to do that in one shot.) This part is the painful part, and this time Fidelity is the culprit: they insist on a paper check to issue the distribution from the traditional IRA, and on a "medallion" signature on the paperwork (I never heard of that before--it's like a super-notary). Fortunately, that's only one-time pain if you do it correctly.

So, as I say, PITA, but if you have any significant after-tax money in retirement funds, getting it into a Roth should be a priority--and, fortunately, our plan (DPSP) allows for all the maneuvers necessary to do so.

Birdo1

Great info—thanks!


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mispoken

Jug,

I seem to recall some IRS rule (I think you’re referring to that above) about having balances in TIRAs. The gist of it is, don’t keep money in them unless you absolutely have to, because it limits your ability to do backdoor conversions. I don’t remember exactly what the IRS rule was though. Can you decipher what I’m getting at with the limited and incomplete info I’ve given you? I gotta start writing this stuff down....

Jughead135

Any time you do a conversion rollover (which is what you’re doing for a back door Roth), you have to prorate your pre-tax and after-tax balances across ALL (traditional) IRAs you own—you cannot just convert the after-tax portion. Thus, you’ll pay current-year tax on any pre-tax portion so converted.

Assuming that avoiding current-year tax is your goal, you have to keep your traditional IRA(s) empty, so that when you make your contribution then convert it to a Roth, the pre-tax proration is zero.

mispoken

That’s right, the pro rata rule! I remember now. Thanks!

gloopy

Again, its the average. There's value in seeing where you stand against the average. The extremes wash out in the average anyway and aren't relevant. If you (the one viewing the data) are in one of the extremes, odds are you know that. There are people at all income levels including ours that live paycheck to paycheck in perpetuity because of poor spending and savings habits. If them seeing how they compare to their peers lights a fire under them to do better than that's a win for all of us.

I'm not saying this is some kind of gold mine for retirement security, and I would want it to be confidential. And obviously its not a cost item on our wish list, but it shouldn't have to be.

Again, not the biggest deal but it would be nice to see.