BiggerPockets Money Podcast - 558: How to Start Investing for Retirement: 401(k), IRA, Roth?

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

The IRA vs. 401(k). You’ve heard of these retirement accounts before, but do you know the difference between the two? Maybe you have a 401(k) at work and have been diligently getting your employer match but struggle to describe what you’re investing in. You’ve heard top financial experts talk about how a Roth IRA is crucial for saving on taxes long-term, but are you eligible to invest in one? Today, we’re discussing top retirement accounts and how to start investing with just $100. CFP (Certified Financial Planner) Kyle Mast joins Mindy on today’s show to answer common questions about 401(k)s, IRAs, Roth IRAs, and HSAs! We’ll first describe when you should invest in a 401(k) vs. an IRA, why their Roth equivalents are so valuable, especially if you’re itching to save on taxes in retirement, and the best account for beginners that (most) Americans will get free money from. What happens after you leave a job and your 401(k) remains? Kyle discusses the options to ensure your money stays invested, even after leaving an employer. We’ll also get into the triple-tax benefit HSA (health savings account) that you should take advantage of IF you qualify, which accounts to invest in first, and what to do once you’ve maxed out your retirement accounts! In This Episode We Cover 401(k)s vs. IRAs and which to invest in first (especially if you’re employed!) Roth IRAs and 401(k)s explained and when to choose a Roth over a traditional account The best retirement account for beginners and how to get free money for retirement How to take control of a 401(k) after leaving an employer Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and who qualifies for these extremely tax-benefited accounts Which accounts to invest in first when maximizing retirement savings How we would start investing for retirement if we only had $100/month extra And So Much More! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Money Facebook Group Network with Other Investors on The Path to FIRE Through the BiggerPockets Forums Finance Review Guest Onboarding Join BiggerPockets for FREE Mindy on BiggerPockets Scott on BiggerPockets Listen to All Your Favorite BiggerPockets Podcasts in One Place Apply to Be a Guest on The Money Show Podcast Talent Search! Find an Investor-Friendly Agent in Your Area Find Investor-Friendly Lenders BiggerPockets Money Group Buy Scott’s Book “Set for Life” See Mindy and Scott at BPCON2024 in Cancun!  BiggerPockets Money - Episode 549: Is FIRE Dead? No, But Here’s Why Most WON’T Achieve It See Mindy at BPCON2024 in Cancun! Traditional 401(k) vs. Roth IRA: Which One Wins? 00:00 Intro 02:17 401(k)s vs. IRAs 05:07 Roth IRAs and 401(k)s 11:21 Best Account for Beginners 14:31 401(k)s After Ending Employment 19:58 Health Savings Accounts (HSA) 26:46 How to Invest $100 32:00 Connect with Kyle! Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/money-558 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can I start investing? What account should I prioritize? And what are the differences between all the different kinds of investing accounts? These are questions we get here at Bigger Pockets all the time. So today we're going to break down the differences between some of the most popular investing accounts so you can feel confident on how your money is working for you when you're investing. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast.

My name is Mindy Jensen. And joining me today is the fantabulous Kyle Nass. It's good to be here, Mindy. Good to be back talking with you again. It's been a while since you and I have been on the podcast together. This is the place where if you want to get your financial house in order, we really do believe that financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you're starting.

So let's just jump right into this really exciting topic about 401Ks and Roth IRAs. Some people might think, ooh, 401Ks and Roth IRAs, that's not so exciting. But we know different. We know our listeners absolutely love discussing this. So today we're going to talk about the key differences between the 401Ks, and the IRA plan. We're going to define what Roth means. We're going to talk about the types of accounts that you should be prioritizing and how to

get started investing with this little as $100. Kyle, thank you so much for joining me today. And as a reminder to my listeners, Kyle is a CFP, but he's not your CFP. So do not take this as investment advice. All right, Kyle, let's jump in. I want to provide some context as to why this is so important. So 45% of Americans currently investing in retirement savings accounts, such as 401k or an individual retirement account called an IRA, said that they don't fully understand these investments.

In fact, I was visiting with friends recently, was having a conversation about retirement accounts, as one does. And one woman said she was investing in her Roth. And when I asked her for a bit of a clarification, do you mean your Roth 401K? or your Roth IRA, she wasn't really sure what the difference was. So I thought, well, she's a really smart woman. If she doesn't know, I bet there's a lot of other people who don't know. So I said, I'm going to call my friend Kyle, a CFP, not my CFP, and ask him some questions.

So that's how we are here today. You should be understanding where your money's going. Kyle, let's jump in with everybody's favorite account, the 401K. Or is that everybody's favorite account? I like mine. Well, I don't know. Yeah. If the employer's giving you free money in it, it's going to be.

be one of your favorite accounts for sure. So let's start this off on the right foot. I just want to make sure we're kind of on the right page moving forward. So let's set up two different buckets. We've got your individual retirement accounts, your IRAs. And then you've got employer plans, which include numbered things like 401Ks, 401Ks, 401A's, 457s, all these things that do a little bit different things, but in general, kind of the same account at an employer. Most people know them as the 401K. So you've got your IRAs individual, 401k. So you've got your IRAs individual, 401ks at your employer. So basically, just to give you a quick overview of the 401K, an employer will add that as a

benefit to an employee where an employee can both put some of their own money that they earn through their paycheck directly into that account to save for retirement. And the employer sometimes will match what the employee puts in up to a certain percentage amount, which is free money. And you want to look forward to that. You want to look forward and try to do that. and you will also sometimes just get a straight up contribution from your employer in that account too. But the thing to keep in mind is that these two separate areas of your life, your employer accounts,

the 401k is the tax wrapper. It's not an investment itself. It is the tax vehicle that you put investments in. So inside your 401k, you would invest in things like, you know, X or Google or Facebook, all these different stocks or better yet, an index fund that owns. thousands of stocks and doesn't fluctuate as much with the ups and downs of a bad accounting department of one stock. Those investments go inside the tax wrapper of the 401k. The 401k designation is from the tax code. But that's the wrapper. The individual retirement account,

that's your personal wrapper. Same type of deal. You can save for retirement with some stipulations. You put the investments inside of the wrapper. The IRA itself is not an investment. It's the tax wrapper around the present. Does that kind of get us started there, That does get us started. And I love that you clarified that that's not the investment itself. I have heard from far too many people that they put money into their 401k or into their IRA, but they never designated where it was supposed to go. So you can do this. It just sits there as cash earning, I believe, zero percent interest for as long as you have it not invested in any specific things. So if you aren't sure, where your money is sitting right now, go and investigate. Because if it's not, if it hasn't been designated into something, you could be missing out on some of these big gains that we've had recently. Let's jump to that Roth part that you were just talking about with your friend. You know, what is, where's that?

We've got the individual retirement account, the wrapper for the personal side retirement accounts. We've got the 401K wrapper for the employer side of investment accounts. And what's this Roth thing? Well, the Roth is named after a senator. I think that came up with this idea to put money in a different way. Instead of putting it pre-tax into these accounts where you haven't been taxed on it yet and you get taxed on it when it comes out, that's a traditional IRA or a traditional 401K. It goes in pre-tax, you're taxed on it when you draw it out in retirement.

The Roth function is the opposite. So you can put money into a Roth IRA after you've already paid tax on it. And the cool thing about that, the bummer is that you're paying tax on it. So you need to make more money to put the amount of money into the Roth IRA. The cool thing is once it's in there, it grows tax-free. And whenever you take it out in retirement, it comes out tax-free as well. All that growth, it doesn't matter what tax bracket you're in or anything. It's really cool.

And we'll get into that a little bit more, how neat that is. Same thing with the employer side of things. You have a Roth 401K and a traditional 401K. Like I said, the traditional is pre-tax, comes out, pay tax on it. The Roth 401k, you pay tax on it today when you earn on your W2 income. It gets withheld from your paycheck and then money goes into that Roth 401K. Once it's in there, you've already paid tax on that money and the stipulation of the tax code lets that money grow tax free and come out tax free in retirement.

So cool. It's so cool. There's so many things that these Roth accounts, if you can't already tell, I love these Roth accounts. They're not always the answer, but a lot of times they are. There's just a lot of flexibility with them. So you need to think of these two wrappers, personal and employer. And within those two, there's Roth and traditional in general. Those are the ways to think about this. Kyle, a little side note here. I am not currently contributing to my Roth 401k because I'm trying to reduce my taxable income. So I am contributing to a traditional 401k. Is there a point? where it makes sense to contribute to the Roth instead of the traditional? And is it like an age range?

Is it an income level? Yeah. So this is the $10,000, $100,000 question. And it's not as easy. You might Google and find articles that say, if you make below $100,000, you should probably just do the Roth side of things. If you make more than that, maybe you make more than $150,000 or $200,000, you should definitely do the traditional side of things to,

get it pre-tax and it lowers your taxable income now when you're making more money. And the idea is that in retirement, you don't have a regular job. You can pull it out and you're in a lower tax bracket when you're taxed on it. In general, when you're making less money now and maybe you're younger, it's good to do the Roth rate because you're not going to pay as much tax on it. It's going to grow tax-free and it's going to come out later tax-free. And it's also not going to be susceptible to whatever crazy tax law changes are 30, 40, 20 years from now, whatever your age ranges. You know, you're taking some risk off the table in the sense that you're putting certainty into your equation of retirement planning.

If you're closer to retirement, you're in your high income years and, you know, in five, 10, 15 years, maybe you're going to quit and you're not going to have much income. It might make a lot more sense to put into the traditional side of things, either a traditional 4-1K or traditional IRA in order to bump your taxable income down significantly. And when you're in those age ranges of over 50, I mean, you can, you're talking like $30,000 a year that you can put in there. And I'm saying these numbers in generalities, I can give you the ones for 2024, but they'll adjust by next year. So let's make this a little evergreen. But around that area, and you can, you can adjust it down, your income down now and then pull that out in a few years.

You don't have to wait to a retirement age. In all, in both of these, buckets, generally retirement age is 59 and a half. And if you take out before then, you have to pay a 10% penalty. If it's a traditional account, you also have to pay tax on it, too. So it really hits you. The Roth account, the Roth individual IRA, individual retirement account is unique in that the contributions, not the growth you get, but just the contributions that you put in it over the years can basically act like a fail safe emergency fund. You can pull that money out anytime you want to and not pay any tax on it. You already pay tax on it and not pay any penalty either, which is just sweet. So it's, it's kind of a place that you

can sock money away as a buffered emergency fund. I mean, I know real estate investors that use the Roth IRA as their reserves fund when they're getting lending. You know, they have this Roth IRA that they keep piling up over the years and they can show it to lenders and be like, hey, you know, I have all these reserves. These are my contributions that I've made. I can pull this out tax free. You know, this money that's in here is actually everything that I would get out when I would need it if I were to like start defaulting or something. So, there's some nuance to that. But that's a fairly good overview of the different scenarios where you'd want to use each one. But the cool thing is that you can really get

into the weeds depending on your situation and contribute to either of them to kind of optimize what your financial situation is. Now I'm going to ask about the Roth 401k versus the traditional 401k. Can I contribute to both? Yes. Yes, you can contribute to both of them. But there's an annual limit on the Roth IRA and the 401k, and it's combined. So the annual limit for 2024 is $23,000. So you could do $12,000 to the Roth, $11,000 to the traditional part of the 401K, but you can't do $23,000 to both. And if you're over age 50, there's some catch-up contributions. You can actually do a little bit more than that, but essentially you can choose which one you want to put it into and you'll be taxed accordingly. If you do the traditional one, you'll reduce

your taxes now, you'll pay for it later. The Roth one, you pay it now, but you won't later. Just some of those things to keep in mind between those two accounts when you're contributing to them. If you are starting to invest today, you Kyle, because you're a CFP, not everybody else's CFP, if you were starting to invest today, where would you look into first? The 401k or the IRA and then traditional or Roth? Everyone's favorite answer. It depends. but in general, you want to look to your employer 401k first to see if they offer any sort of match for you contributing. So a lot of times they want to contribute to your retirement. If you take the initiative to also contribute to retirement also, they'll match up to like 3% of your salary.

Or they'll do something like they'll match half of the first 3% you put in and then a quarter of the next 3%. Or they do different things like that. But it's usually around 3% to 5% that a typical employer will match for their employees. with the 401k that they have. And the reason you look to do that first is it's free money. So, so, you know, 100% return on your money. You really can't beat that in just about any scenario. And that includes whether you choose personally to do a Roth 401k contribution or a traditional 401k contribution. We've got a quick message from our sponsors, but don't go anywhere. When we come back, we will hear more on making the most of your 401K. Tax season is one of the only times all year when most people actually look at their

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Welcome back to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. I want to jump in right here and say, if you're not sure if your company is, offers a match, you need to go to your HR department. There are so many different benefits that your HR department and your company offer you. And during your onboarding, you're getting thrown a ton of stuff. If you didn't specifically take that information and put it to the side to read it later, you could be missing out on a lot of things, including the 401k match, including the different options that are available to you from your employer, including a lot of things like some employers will give you a discounted or free healthcare membership. So that's outside the scope of

this discussion. But I wanted to say, talk to HR if you're not sure if there's a match because you could be leaving, like Kyle said, free money on the table. And if you don't want it, you can just write me a check. Yeah, that sounds great. And this is something where like your personal responsibility will come in because it has happened so many times where the HR department doesn't even know what they have, especially like at a smaller employer that just contracts one of these plans out. to a big investment firm. They don't even know what they're offering. And then you read this plan document and you need to do your own research.

You know, talk to the HR department. They might know what they're talking about. They might not, but dig into it deeply because you might find some good money there that you couldn't find somewhere else. And the other thing that you need to also look at too is we're talking kind of almost like 401Ks always have a Roth component to them. They don't always. That's something that employers have started adding more recently and more regularly in the last

maybe five to 10 years, but they still don't all have the Roth option. Sometimes you can only do a pre-tax option. In that case, if there's free money, I'd still go with that one, even if you're trying to get some post-tax money, like at least do enough to get the free money out of that. And then you can start looking at other things like a Roth account after that. Awesome. Kyle, let's talk about the end of employment, leaving your employer. A hundred years ago, I left an employer and I had, for some reason, I had known that at the time, you had to have $5,000 in your account and then you could keep it with their 401k provider. But if you didn't, they would ask you to leave and take the money with you. And when I was leaving this employer, I was not happy about it.

And they're like, well, we'd really like you to move your 401K. I'm like, well, I don't really care what you want. I don't want to leave it. I don't want to move it. I want to leave it here because it was a really great plan. Is that $5,000 still a thing? Or was that just subject to that specific company? Or do I have the option of leaving it with a really great 401K? So I'll give you a little behind the scenes on the industry. So the reason they want you to move that $5,000 out is it costs them money in paperwork and junk to deal with small accounts.

Like that's just the way it is. For big investment firms managing billions of dollars of 401k plans, for companies and hundreds of companies, these little accounts that have $375 in them or little $4,250, it's still real money. Like this is not nothing to a normal person, but to a billion dollar company that's trying to, you know, they have these margins of tiny basis points that they're running. So that's, they want to clean house and get things very streamlined. So that's why you're being asked to do that.

Sometimes it's written into the plan that you actually do have to pull it out. sometimes it's just they're trying to do it to you and you can just say no. But sometimes they have it written in and they'll actually send you a check. Like if you don't take it out in time, so that's, there's an issue right there. So if if you have a pre-tax account, say you're 35, so you're not retirement age yet and you get a distribution from that because you left an employer, say it's $3,500, that is going to be taxed to you as income in that year plus a penalty. But you have 60 days to do what's called an indirect rollover, which means that money came to you first.

You stuck it in your checking account, and you have 60 days to open up a traditional IRA, most likely, is the easiest option to take traditional 401K money and just write a check to that. You open up at like E-Trade or Schwab or J.P. Morgan, you know, an online platform or you go into your bank and they'll happily open up for you. But that's a whole other discussion of like talking to financial advisors

and getting your, you know, shorts taken from you. It's a really terrible picture. So, you know, you just need to keep that in mind when those distributions come that you, you do need to make a decision on those. And they can actually make you take those out. But in general, what I usually tell people is even if the plan seems really good at the employer, these days, you can find individual IRA accounts that are just no cost. basically for the consumer, it's a good idea to take that money and have a dumping place for it

where you pull it all together. If you have two or three jobs of the course of 15 or 20 years and they all have traditional accounts, you open a traditional IRA at E-Trade and bring those accounts. It's called a direct rollover. If you can, you get paperwork from your employer specifically. You put in your account number of your new IRA account and they will send a check to E-Trade for the benefit of Kyle Masked account number, one, two, three, four, five, six, eight, nine. And that check will go in there. And then it's in your individual tax wrapper and you choose what to

invest it in. You know, if you want to buy grocery outlet, stock or Walmart or an index fund. Like that's your, you now have control of it. And again, investing options, we can talk about that another time or you can listen to like all these past episodes that Mindy has done on this podcast to get kind of that information. But when you leave the employer, you, have the option to roll it over to a traditional or your own individual account. You also have the option to roll it into your new employer's account if they allow that. A lot of employers do. Not all of them do, but a lot of them do. That's not always, I would say rarely is that the best option from a flexibility standpoint. Usually you want to gain control of those funds as quickly

as you can. There's a lot of things you can do once you have control of the funds in your own account. You can just process things faster. You can make decisions on like converting to Roth IRAs, which is a different subject faster. It's just you have more visibility and control of it. You can invest it in whatever you want. You're not limited to the employer's investment selections. They might like at Vanguard. You might like Fidelity Index funds. You can you can do whatever you want with your individual retirement account relatively compared to what your employer can do. So just know that there is something that needs to happen when you leave an employer, but you do have some really good options of what you can do. Okay. It sounds like you're going to send me back to those documents

and make me read them again. Thanks, Kyle. But I also, I really do want to encourage people to take ownership of your money and read through all of the things that are provided for you. It doesn't read like a Stephen King novel. It's pretty boring. But make sure you understand what it is you're getting into and how you can get out of that. So outside of the 401k and the IRA, both Roth and traditional, what other accounts should people be looking into and prioritizing, contributing to? Yeah. So I would say the next big one is the HSA. And people have probably heard about this in a podcast or at their employer in an HR packet or something, a health savings account. And basically, it's money, it's a certain amount of money each year that you can put into an account that is yours.

It's, you have to have a qualified high deductible insurance plan that meets certain stipulations. And your plan will tell you it'll say, and usually it's like you have a high enough deductible that it meets something in the tax code that allows you to put extra money away and deduct it on your taxes. So you're not paying any tax on it. And then it's sitting in this account. The HSA is another one of these wrappers. And it's an individual wrapper.

It's your own individual wrapper. Sometimes it's tied with your employer and your employer can send money to it or they will send money to it. But it's your account. It goes with you. You don't even have to roll it over. It's your account that you keep. So it goes with you no matter what employer you go to. But you deduct those contributions up to a certain amount each year.

But then that account can be used to pay for medical expenses. And it's a changing list of medical expenses over the decades that they've adjusted it to. used to be like really lax and you could do anything from cough drops to to whatever. But now it's not quite that easy. But it's a cool account. You can pay for like dental appointments, vision, you know, some of these things with untaxed money. So it makes the money go a lot further.

And the other thing about that account, and if you're getting into the crazy financial independence hacking world of optimizing your finances, if you don't use it, you save it up, tax free over the years. You can pull it out just like a, an IRA account in retirement at retirement age. And I think it's age 65. It's a little bit different than the other accounts of 59.5. But you can pull it out and it just gets added to your income. You can also do currently in the tax code, they might change this. You can actually, people will fund their HSAs completely and pay out of pocket while they're working for their medical expenses.

keep their receipts from all those payments, whether that's like, you know, in an electronic file or a physical file. I mean, yep, look at, Mindy's pulling it out right now. If you were listening to this podcast, maybe pull it up on YouTube. Oh, yuck. Wow, that is just well done. I have a big pile of receipts. And I need to scan them in because these receipts aren't going to stay forever. That is my husband's job.

He's the tech guy. I just save them and keep filing them. because I am able to cash flow my expenses right now, my medical expenses. And then when I don't have a job anymore, I can take all of those. And because they are from when I had an HSA, I can take all of those and withdraw it. Tax-free. So it's tax-free going in, tax-free growth, tax-free when I pull it out for qualified medical expenses, and all of those are.

And anytime I have a receipt from like Walgreens or Target, there's a little F next to things like Band-Aids and Saline solution and things that qualify for the HSA plan. I save those too because I wear contacts. I need the saline solution and I am going to get that credit down the road when I don't have a job. When I don't like, why would I start pulling from my 401k and my IRA when I've got this HSA that I can pull from that went in tax free, grew tax free, and now I'm going to pull it out tax free.

I love paying all the taxes I have to, but I hate paying any taxes that I don't have to. For sure. And I'd always like to remind people these tax, you know, hack can be a bad word sometimes, but these tax, these are incentives that are written into the code. The government wants you to do these things. They wouldn't have written them in the code otherwise. The reason that the tax code exists is to basically incentivize a population of people, whatever government or state it is, to do certain things.

There's a reason why real estate investors get so many tax benefits is because it creates so many jobs. It creates the movement of the economy from transactions, moving things along, money movement. The government knows this. Every government in the world knows this. So real estate is really well tax incentivized. This type of thing, encouraging people to save for retirement.

and not be a burden on society is really good for the country. And that's why they incentivize these certain things. The reason I want to point out in Mindy's scenario here with the HSA, and we'll try not to get into the weeds too much here, but this idea of saving the receipts, why wouldn't you just pay for them now? You know, you're taking out the same money either way. It's the middle thing she mentioned that it grows tax-free.

So if you can let the money sit in there and grow and compound, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40 years, that's really powerful. That starts to add up to thousands, tens of thousands of dollars. And what you can do with the HSA is you can do some tax planning where there's different tax brackets when you pull out income in retirement. You have these traditional accounts that we've talked about. We have these Roth accounts that we talk about. And this HSA account, they're all taxed differently when you bring them out. So you can basically fill up a low tax bracket with your taxable distributions from your 401k, your traditional 401k or your traditional IRA to a certain point so you don't

pay much tax on it, maybe a little bit. And if you need more income with that, you pull out your Mindy crazy receipt file of HSA receipts and pull out another 10,000 for the year. And if you're like, well, you know, maybe I need more than that, but, you know, maybe I want to pull it from somewhere else. We'll pull it out of my Roth IRA. Let's do another 10,000 out of my Roth IRA for the year. But really, you're only getting taxed on what you pulled out of your traditional IRA account for that retirement year. And when you have these. different accounts, it really lets you optimize things later on in life because you don't know what life is going to look like. You don't know if you're still going to be working when you're 70

or 80. Like maybe you find something cool. You start a business or like you're, and you still got to do some planning and having these different accounts really makes a big difference. So piecing all these together, that's that's the next, knowing what these accounts are, but then having the end in mind and starting to piece them together as you move through the years is really important. We have one last quick ad break before we'll give you a road. map of how to start investing with just $100. Tax season is one of the only times all year when most people actually look at their full financial picture, including income, spending, savings, investments, the whole thing.

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That's a rough question. I think, you know, it just depends on what your goal is. I would, if I only had $100 to invest each month and I had to invest it in the traditional sense, like in an account or something, I'd do Roth IRA, like all day long. I just, I just keep it simple. I'd probably do it. I probably wouldn't even worry about the match at the employer. I, you know, now I'm just like second guessing myself. I mean, maybe I would. I probably look at that because doubling $100 would be a big deal. So yeah, I probably would go with the employer first. But $100, so this is the question I would ask myself. This is why I'm struggling with this question.

And I'm going to turn around on you after I'm done answering this, Mindy. You're going to have to answer this one. But my struggle with this one is $100 a month. I remember when I was investing $100 a month, like in college. And what I realized pretty quickly is it does not move the needle. Like it doesn't move the needle in a significant way that I would want it to towards financial independence. And what I mean by that is that not that $1,200 a year is not no money.

it is. But I think at that level, that $100 a month should be used for something that gives you much greater return, whether that's like buying books to read about how to flip a house or using $100 to, so in college, when I was in college, you could just start to buy textbooks online. Whoa, so cool. Like half.com by eBay. That's where we bought it. But I would literally go through dumpsters and pull out these college textbooks online. Whoa, so cool. Like half.com by eBay. That's where we bought it. But I would literally go through dumpsters and pull out these college textbooks that kids would just chuck and pull them out and sell them online.

And then I would also buy some from kids. I'd like, hey, I'll give you $10 for that like, you know, three inch thick science book and you could sell for $150 bucks online. So when I see $100 a month, I see you have the time potentially or you're going to, to get more bandwidth out of that $100 a month by doing something non-traditional than just

putting in an account. If you want to keep it simple, maybe the match or your 401k or just do a Roth IRA. But Mindy, how would you answer this one after I totally stumbled through it? No, I thought that was great. You were thinking through a question that I kind of just threw at you. You said something very close to the end. You said, you probably have the time. when I was, and you said when you were investing in college, $100 a month, nerd. I was also investing in college because I am also a nerd. But I had way more time than I had money. And I was in college a couple of years ago before the internet, before all of this gig economy.

If you have only $100 to invest every month, then I'm going to guess that you have more time than money. So go out there and find a way to generate enough income that you can at least max out a Roth IRA over the course of a year. I really liked it when it was $6,000 because that's $500 a month. Now it's $7,000 and I'm not going to do the math. It's a little bit more than $500 a month. But you have the ability most likely to generate more income in other ways. Be creative like Kyle and dumpster dive and sell that stuff.

Sell those books on eBay. There's no shortage of rich kids at college who are like, I don't want to bother selling my book. I'm just going to throw it out. Or, you know, you catch them on the last day of science class. Hey, everybody, I got $10 for anybody who wants to give me their book and see what happens. But yeah, I love the creativity. There are definitely ways, easy ways to generate $500 a month just by, or whatever $7,000 divided by 12 is, just by being a little bit creative.

Look around your house. You've got stuff to sell. Look into, I was just in Madison, Wisconsin, which is a college town, and they have, it's called hippie Christmas. Apologies to any hippies that are upset by that. It's called hippie Christmas, and everybody throws all their garbage at the curb, and you can drive through. I got a whole wardrobe for Carl one year.

Still on hangers. The guy just left it in his house and walked away from his lease. And the people cleaning it out went in, grabbed them by like this, by the hangars, took them off the bar and put it at the corner. And it was every size was Carl's size. And I was like. I love that. I want so bad to ask Carl how he felt about that. He still has some of the clothes.

Okay. Well, that's good. So you can be really, really creative. But if they didn't fit him, I mean, they were some nice Levi's jeans and, you know, nice button-down shirts. I could have had a garage sale. You can put things on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist and eBay and you can sell a lot of different kinds of things. So definitely get creative and generate more.

But if you only have $100 and no time to make any extra, I like your idea of the Roth IRA and I would encourage you to go to the library to read these books about investing. All right, Kyle, thank you so much for a lively discussion today. I really appreciate all of your brain space being shared. with our listeners. What are you up to and where can people find you online? Oh man. I'm up to, you know, I'm like traveling an RV with my family, doing sports camps, babysitting chickens, cat ran into my office while we're recording here. Just really fun stuff, you know, that a guy with seven and three boys, seven and under is up to. You know, I'm online,

Kylemas.com. I write a newsletter every now and then, not very often. But yeah, just love jumping on here with you, Mindy. What are you up to these days? I haven't seen you for a while. What are you doing this summer? You know, this summer, I have been traveling like crazy and school starts tomorrow. And I am kind of excited to be at home for a little bit. Like I went on a three week road trip in June. I went on a two week road trip in July. And now it's August. And I just want to relax for a bit. So I'm excited to be finally at home for school to start. That sounds nice. Yep. I think everyone starts craving that about this time of year. Yeah, it is really nice. All right, that wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. He, of course, is the Kyle Mast. And I am Mindy Jensen, in honor of

the Paris Olympics closing. I say adieu, Caribou. Bigger Pockets Money was created by Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench. This episode was produced by Eric Knudson, copywriting by Calico content. Post production by Exodus Media and Chris McKin. Thanks for listening.