The Personal Finance Podcast - Which is Better a 529 or Roth IRA for Your Kids? Money Q&A
Episode Date: August 14, 2023In this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, which is better: a Roth IRA or a 529 plan for investing for your kids? How Andrew Can Help You: Join The Master Money Newsletter where you will be...come smarter with your money in 5 minutes or less per week Here! Learn to invest by joining Index Fund Pro! This is Andrew’s course teaching you how to invest! Watch The Master Money Youtube Channel! Ask Andrew a question on Instagram or TikTok. Learn how to get out of Debt by joining our Free Course Leave Feedback or Episode Requests here. Thanks to Our Amazing Sponsors for supporting The Personal Finance Podcast. Chime: Start your credit journey with Chime. Sign-up takes only two minutes and doesn’t affect your credit score. Get started at chime.com/ Shopify: Shopify makes it so easy to sell. Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at shopify.com/pfp Policygenius: This is where I got my term life insurance. Policygenius is made so easy. To get your term policy go to policygenius.com and make sure your loved ones are safe. Factor 75: Head to factormeals.com/pfp50 and use code pfp50 to get 50% off your first box. These are amazingly easy and nutritious meals. Delete Me: Go to joindeleteme.com/PFP and use promo code PFP you’ll be able to save 20% off your DeleteMe subscription! Protect yourself online! Indeed: Start hiring NOW with a SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLAR SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to upgrade your job post at Indeed.com/personalfinance Monarch Money: Get an extended 30 day free trial at monarchmoney/pfp . Relevant Episode: The Back Door Roth IRA (How High Earners Can Get Money Into a Roth IRA!) Connect With Andrew on Social Media: Instagram TikTok Twitter Master Money Website Master Money Youtube Channel Free Guides: The Stairway to Wealth: The Order of Operations for your Money How to Negotiate Your Salary The 75 Day Money Challenge Get out Of Debt Fast Take the Money Personality Quiz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, which is better?
A Roth IRA or a 529 plan for investing for your kids?
All right.
Welcome to the personal finance podcast.
I'm your host, Andrew founder of MasterMoney.com.
And today on the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to be talking about which is better,
the 529 plan or the Roth IRA for your kids.
And this is a money Q&A episodes.
We have a bunch of other questions as well.
If you guys have any questions, make sure to hit us up on.
on Instagram or TikTok at Master Money Co and follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts,
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We got our YouTube videos and we have our podcast videos on there as well.
Now today, we're going to be going through a number of different questions here, including
the first one, which is better, a 529 plan or.
a Roth IRA for kids.
Secondly, why does money not compound more in one account than it does in other account?
So this is one where it is a common misconception for a lot of people.
They think money compounds all in one account more, and so they try to combine all their money
into one account, but it actually doesn't work that way.
We'll talk about why.
And then number three, what should I choose?
The traditional 401K or the Roth 401K based on a number of different scenarios.
We're going to go into that one as well because I think that's a really, really important
distinction between the two of those.
Now, really, really excited to answer these questions and to get it in this episode.
So without further ado, let's get into it.
All right. So the first one is, which is better, a 529 plan or a Roth IRA for your kids?
So I get this question a lot. And so I wanted to cover this in this episode so that we can kind of talk through some of this stuff.
Now, in my eyes, the way that I think about this is the Roth IRA and the 529 plan have two very different purposes.
So the Roth IRA is traditionally a retirement account, and we'll explain deeper into the Roth IRA in a second,
but it is a retirement account and is usually open for wealth building, whereas the 529 plan is typically used for education expenses.
Now, there are some things that you can do with a 529 plan, and there are some things that you can do with a Roth IRA that are very special,
including, for example, the Legacy 529 plan, there's a lot of ways that you can use a 529 plan,
which we're going to have an entire episode on, on how you can actually get more.
money to your children and build that generational wealth without paying taxes. And there's a couple of
cool things to do there. And a lot of really wealthy people use the 529 plan as a pass-through to
give money to their children and to their grandchildren as well. So this is a very cool way that you can
actually find some pass-through money and do some really cool things with it. But secondly,
the 529 plan also has more flexibility based on a couple of laws that have been passed that we'll
talk about here as well. So first, let's go through the Roth IRA. So the Roth IRA, when it comes to
your kids is you have to open what is called a custodial Roth IRA. Now, with a custodial Roth IRA,
the way this works is that the parents go and open the custodial Roth IRA, and then the beneficiary
of that custodial Roth IRA is your child. But this is mainly used for retirement savings. The way
the Roth IRA works is that you contribute money that has already been taxed. The money grows tax-free,
and then you can pull the money out tax-free. The custodial Roth IRA works the same way. Now, the caveat
to this is that you absolutely have to have earned income in order to open a custodial Roth IRA.
Not you.
Your children have to have earned income to open a custodial Roth IRA.
So you can't open one up for your newborn baby and start contributing to it because they have
no earned income unless they are some sort of baby model and they earn income in some way,
shape, or form.
You have to have earned income.
You have to report that income and have proof of that earned income as well.
Now, you can earn income in any different way.
You can earn income from washing your neighbor's car.
You can earn income from pressure washing houses, starting your own business.
You can earn income from working at the grocery store down the street.
You can earn income from working in your own parents' businesses.
This is where you can get like toddlers involved and all that sort of thing is by having people
work in your own businesses.
Now, one thing you want to note, my accountant always talks about this because people
try to take advantage of this.
If you're paying your children, you want to make sure that the pay actually fits the job.
Because if you're paying somebody $1,000 an hour to, you're paying your children, you're
mop your floors, that's not going to work with the IRS. It has to be something where it is
actually justifiable for the task that they are doing. So if you have somebody baby modeling
on three Instagram pictures for you, for your business, that's not going to justify paying
them $6,500 every single year. I mean, if you can find some comparables, maybe you can work that
out, but it's not worth the risk to do that. So a number of different things that you can do,
you can pay them in your business in order for them to earn income, they can get those side hustles,
they can get those side jobs. You just have to have proof that they earned that income.
Now, do they have to take that exact income and put it in the Roth IRA rate? No, you can contribute
it for them. You can only contribute up to the amount that they earn. So if they own $2,000,
then you can contribute $2,000. If they earn $3, you can contribute $6,500. You can contribute $6,500.
It just depends on how much money they are contributing. Now, the beautiful thing about the Roth IRA rate
is you are contributing post-tax dollars, but the growth of that money is what is completely tax-free.
So why is this so powerful? For kids, this is even more powerful. It's powerful for all of us,
but for kids, this is even more powerful. Why? Because they have so much time for this money to compound.
And no matter what, if you allow compound interest to work inside of a Roth IRA, because they have those limits of
every single year that you can only put $6,500 per year into a Roth IRA at the time recording this,
because they have those contribution limits, the majority of that account is going to be the growth of your money.
So I've done this example a bunch of times where I've talked about maxing out a Roth IRA every single
year for 30 years. We're going to have a little more than a million dollars in that account.
But the cool thing about this is, of that million dollars, 80% of that is going to be the growth
of that money, almost 85% actually, is going to be the growth of that money. And only 15% is going to
be your contributions. And so it's like $850,000 is going to be completely tax-free. And if they
have a longer time horizon, these Roth IRAs are going to get really big because they have so much time
for money to compound. If you start this with a five-year-old, for example, you let this money
compound all the way until they're 60, even if you get like 1,500 bucks a year into that account,
all of a sudden what's going to happen is they're going to have a Roth IRA with like 6 million
bucks in it. And so this is really, really powerful stuff that you can be doing for your children
by having this Roth IRA. Now, one reason why this is being compared is because there's a couple
of different things that you can do with the Roth IRA. You can use a Roth IRA for higher education
expenses. I would not use it for that exclusively. And the reason why is because there's a lot of
different rules surrounding it with a Roth IRA. Whereas if you go to the 529 plan, you're going to have
a lot more flexibility around these education expenses than you wouldn't side the Roth IRA. But you can
use money in a Roth IRA for education expenses. You can also withdraw contributions at any point in time,
meaning that if you contribute $1,000 per year into your Roth IRA and you have $18,000 that you've
contributed over 18 years that your child has been living under your roof, you can pull $18,000 out of
there penalty free. But they cannot pull any of the gains out of there until they turn age 59
and a half unless it's for very specific things. So there's other things that you can pull it out
for like medical expenses. If your incomes at certain limits, there's a bunch of other stuff there.
But the Roth IRA has a lot of flexibility, but I would not use it as my primary education account.
So that's your thought process. If you're thinking through, hey, maybe my Roth IRA could be
my primary education account, not the route you boy would go with. Instead, the way I do it is the
Roth IRA is going to be a wealth building account.
A taxable brokerage is another wealth building account that we're using.
And the 529 plan, which we'll get into right now, is used for education expenses.
So 529 plans are super, super cool, get a ton of tax benefits, but they are primarily used for
education expenses.
And this can be anything, not just college, this can be K through 12 tuition in many states,
and it can also be post-secondary education.
If your kids want to go into the trades and they want to get some certifications, you can
also use it for things like that.
You can use it for fees, you can use it for books, you can use it for certain room and board costs.
So 529 plans, they got the goods when it comes to education expenses.
Most people, we don't know what's going to happen in the future, but right now it is in your best
interest a lot of times to go to college based on a lot of different situations because this
studies show that people who have a college degree earn more money.
Now, if you have a business that you're going to hand down to your children and it is a really
good cash flowing sustainable business, you taught them, you're really confident in this,
them taking over that business, awesome. If they want to go into the trades, awesome. We need that stuff.
We need people to go into that. And the trades, the incomes are getting higher and higher in the trades,
which is good. And there's a lot of trades out there. I know welders out there who make $150,000,
$200,000 per year. So it just depends on what you're doing and what type of education expenses
you want to take advantage of. But if you want them to go to private school, you can use this for
private school. And it's got all those tax advantages where you're not paying the taxes on that
money as long as it's used for qualified education expenses. So really, really cool.
thing, but you're putting, like the Roth IRA, you're putting post-tax dollars in there, and the growth
and withdrawals are also tax-free if you use them for qualifying education expenses. So when you put money
into a Roth IRA, you need to invest that money after it's in the Roth IRA. The Roth IRA is not an
investment. The same goes for the $529 plan. You want to make sure that you are investing those dollars
so they can grow over time so you have more money in the $529 plan when it comes to making sure that
you have those qualified medical expenses. Now, contribution limits vary by state because a $529 plan
and typically is a state plan.
But in many cases, they're quite high,
and sometimes they're several hundred thousand dollars.
So it just depends on your state,
Google your state,
look up your 529 plans and see which ones are the best.
Now, I don't like the very state-specific ones.
Like, for example, I live in Florida.
Our 529 state-specific plan is called Florida prepaid.
Not a fan of it whatsoever.
I had Florida prepaid growing up.
My grandfather funded $5,000 into my Florida prepaid account
so that I could have Florida prepaid.
No flexibility, no investing strategies in it.
Instead, I have my kids at,
Fidelity and they have a flexible 529 account and I can invest in Fidelity funds because I have it
over at Fidelity. So if you want a step-by-step video on how to open a 529 plan, holla at your boy.
Let me know. I'll put one on YouTube for you guys and give you guys that so I can show you
exactly how I did mine. Income limits. So with 529 plans, there are no income limits. With Roth IRAs,
you do have income limits, meaning you can't make over a certain amount of money. And so to get your
money into the Roth IRA, you have to do a backdoor Roth IRA, which we talk about a lot here or a mega backdoor
Roth IRA, which we have an episode coming up on. Get excited for that one because that one is
going to be powerful. And you got to make sure that when you have these accounts opened up,
you understand these income limits. There are no income limits to a 529 plan. So anybody can
contribute to them. You can make a zillion dollars, which is not a number, but you can make as
much money as you want and contribute to a 529 plan. And then the penalties in a 529 plan,
which is what stresses people out, which I'll give you a couple tips here in a second.
but if you withdraw the money for non-education expenses, you'll generally have to pay income taxes
and a 10% penalty on the earnings portion of the withdrawal.
Now, we have a 529 episode that we did where we ran the numbers on this.
And even if you invested those dollars over time frame, you would still come out on top
by paying the penalty and by paying the taxes if you put the money in a 529 plan because
it's invested instead of saving it in cash.
So if you're going to save the money in cash, it's much better to invest those dollars.
and if you're unsure about what your children's future is, here's a powerful thing that's happening.
So starting in 2024, you'll be able to transfer $35,000 from a $529 plan to a Roth IRA for the beneficiary.
So it has been the beneficiary's name.
So if you open this custodial Roth IRA for your kids, once they have earned income,
you can actually transfer money into their Roth IRA from the $529 plan.
$35,000 total.
This is a great out for a lot of people who are super worried about their kids actually going to college.
Most people, the average 529 plan does not have that much inside of the account.
So I don't think you have to worry too, too much.
And the rest of the money you can use for education expenses if you decide, hey, they're not
going to go to college or if they have siblings.
You can transfer that money to siblings.
There's a lot of outs that you have here.
And there's some even bigger loopholes that you have here.
And we'll dive deep into those into that episode that you can really, really use to take
advantage of these 529 plans.
So I want you to understand that even if you are worried about your kids and not going
to college, there's a lot of outs that you have.
and or here's a couple of cool ones that I can just think of off the top of my head.
Say, for example, that your kids don't want to go to college, you're retired, you're financially
free because you've been listening to your boy for the last 20 years, and then all of a sudden,
you're financially free, and you say, hey, spouse, why don't we go travel abroad for the summer?
You can take a 529 plan, and you can take classes, college classes, overseas, where you're living
in France or Spain or Italy or wherever else you want to live, and you can study abroad as an adult
and spend that money on the 529 plan.
So you can learn something new.
Maybe you just want to go have some amazing experience where you live somewhere for six months.
Your boarding is going to be covered by the 529 plan, your books, your tuition, and you want to learn that language.
So you can go live in that country.
You can learn that language by studying abroad.
And you can spend that money by studying abroad.
That is a really cool thing that I would love to do at some point in time if my kids did not use my 529 plan.
Because you put your hard earned dollars in there.
Why don't have some amazing six-month experience?
You're financially free.
And it'll cover your expenses.
So lots of cool things that you can do.
do like that. There's even more stuff that you can go through. That's just one example. But there's a lot of
cool stuff like that that you can do with a 529 plan, a lot of creative stuff as well. So you just want those
flexible 529 plans. I don't like state specific. Some people, maybe your state has a great one. I haven't
looked at all of them for every single state. But most of the state specific ones have a lot of
parameters that make them restrictive and you can invest a lot of them. So between those two things,
those are the two major things that I definitely want you to check out. And we're going to dive deeper into
some of this stuff also on the master money newsletter. So if you're not subscribed to the master money
newsletter. It is a newsletter. We teach you how to build wealth in five minutes or less every single
week. And we're going to be diving deep into some of these really, really deep strategies on things like
this, like this 529 plan. What are some really creative ways that you could spend the money in the
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All right.
Question number two is why does money not compound more in one account than it does in multiple
accounts?
So some people have heard me say this a couple of times and they were curious on why this
is the case because this is a common misconception that a lot of people think that if they
combine all their money into one account, it's going to compound faster.
And this simply is not true.
You don't have to combine it all in one account.
You can have it in separate accounts.
The amount of money that you have is what matters, not which account it's in.
if it's all combined together, all that different thing. So compounding is something, it doesn't matter
if it's in one account, if it's spread and across another accounts. It depends on a number of different
factors, including interest rate, frequency of compounding, those types of things. So interest rate,
number one, obviously. Interest rate is your rate of return. So when I say 10% rate of return or I say
7% or 8% or 9% rate of return, that's going to be the number one factor to tell you how much wealth
are going to be building over time frame. If you buy the wrong investments or you have the
wrong asset allocation and your rate of return is 4%. Someone with an 8% rate of rate of
return is going to have much more money in their account when come retirement time. Number two is the
frequency of compounding. So there are some ways where you can invest your money and interest might
be compounded annually or semi-annually or quarterly or monthly. The frequency of how often this is
compounding is number two. And then the distribution across accounts. So I want you to kind of think of it.
Let me just give an example. So imagine that you had $200 and the choice between investing it in a single
account that earned 10% a year or two accounts that each earn 10% in a single year. If you choose the first
and you put $200 in, you would expect $220 by the end of the first year because 10% of $200, so
you'd have $220 by the end of the first year. And if you chose the second, you'd have two accounts
with $100 and each of those $100 accounts would have $110. Combine those together, that's $220.
So it doesn't matter, you spread them out that way and you go through that process. But let's look at
the second year. So after the second year, the single account would have $242, and the two accounts
would each have $121. Combine those two together, $242. And you can go all the way down the line
because the growth of compounding is exponential. And it's true that it's exponential, but it's the same
exponential, no matter how much you start with, no matter how much you start with in that account.
In the 10% example, you're going to double your money roughly every seven years. So this is the
rule of 72. We've talked about the rule of 72. It does not matter.
if you've got $10,000, or $10 million.
In seven years, you will have doubled that money no matter what.
So take a rate of return, multiply it by 72,
and that's how you're going to figure out how fast that money is going to double.
It does not matter if it goes into various accounts or if it's in one account.
So that's the simple answer.
That's exactly how it works.
Hopefully that example helps you if you need a visual example of some sort.
Just let me know.
We've done a video, like a social video on this too, that kind of explains it.
but let me know if you need further examples, but that is why.
Just think about it that way.
All that matters is how much money you're investing across all of your accounts.
It doesn't matter if they're all in one account or if they're separated across a bunch of different accounts.
All right.
Number three, my employer offers both a traditional 401k and a Roth 401k match 100% up to 6%,
meaning that they match 100% of whatever you're contributing up to 6%.
I am contributing to both accounts, but what account would be more beneficial to have my employer
match?
or does it not matter at all and all the employee contributions go to the traditional 401K.
Okay.
So this is basically a question of choosing between traditional 401K and Roth 401K.
A lot of times this is going to depend on your personal financial situation.
For me, I love Roth accounts for a bunch of different reasons.
But some of my favorite reasons why I love Roth accounts is because the tax-free growth
because I don't have to worry about future taxes.
Now, there's a number of factors that I want to talk about here that we can talk about.
But if you've never heard of a Roth 401K, you've only heard of the Roth IRA maybe because we
talked about at the top of the show here.
Roth 401K works exactly like a Roth IRA, except you can get more money into that bad boy,
meaning you can get $22,500 per year into a Roth 401k.
But your employer has to offer it for you to take advantage of a Roth 401k.
If you're self-employed, you can do a solo Roth 401k.
So you can get money in there if you're self-employed.
So a lot of cool things there.
Your contributions are taxed.
The money grows tax-free.
You can pull the money out tax-free.
But also some amazing other things about this is that when you withdraw the
the money. So when you withdraw the money, you're not going to get tax on that income. You're not
going to get tax on that income whatsoever. Whereas if you had a traditional 401k, the way that that works
is that the money goes in and it's tax free. So your income has not been taxed yet. And you're
contributing it automatically from your employer to the 401k. The money grows. And then when you pull
the money out, you're going to get tax on that money. And it's going to be qualified as income tax in
retirement. So this can reduce your social security. A number of other things can happen here. And by the time you
turn age 72, typically, for most people, depending on when you were born, when you're 72,
the government says, hey, you got to start taking this money out of this account.
We're going to issue you what is called a required minimum distribution, and you have to start
taking money out of your 401k because I want my tax money.
I want to get my money out of the contributions that you put in here.
Whereas the Roth 401K, there are no required minimum distributions.
You can let that bad boy compound for as long as you want to.
Oh boy, I love flexibility. You know I love financial flexibility. And when it comes to the Roth 401k,
that thing has a lot of financial flexibility when it comes to retirement because you don't have to get taxed on that money in retirement.
So say, for example, you're collecting Social Security and you're living off your Roth 401K. You're doing those two things right there.
If you're doing those two things right there, your Social Security will not have additional taxes taken out based on your income because you got the Roth there.
There's a book called The Power of Zero that talks about how powerful this is. It's a really, really good.
book. It is in the high performance book club list. So if you're on the master money newsletter,
click that link. It'll be in that list where you can check it out. We give you a link to all of them
that we've done in the past as well when you're on the mastermind newsletter. But that is one where
really very, very powerful book, but it talks about how powerful the Roth is because you don't
really want to be paying a ton of taxes in retirement. And your 401k is qualified as income.
If you have rental income coming in, that's also income. So these are things that you really got to think
about when you start to plan out your retirement on how you actually want to do this stuff.
Now, if you have an employer who offers a Roth 401k now and you've been contributing to a
traditional 401k, you can start contributing to the Roth and you can do some backdoor Roth stuff
with your 401K later on.
There's a lot of cool things that you can do.
We'll talk about that in future episodes, but there's some advanced stuff that you can do
to make sure that you can get more money into Roths.
But if you're thinking about this specifically, it depends on your income.
So right now, what would be more beneficial to you?
And it's really important to talk to your accountant about this.
I talk to mine every single year.
We talk through these scenarios to make sure we understand.
Everything's going in the right places and it is the optimal place for this to go.
So make sure you have a good accountant who understands this stuff.
But when you get this money in, it really depends on your AGI or your adjusted gross income.
And in your AGI, you need to understand, you know, what is my adjusted gross income?
And if your AGI is like 32% or above, then I would start to consider the traditional 401k so that you can get a tax break now because you're making a lot of money.
and so you want to get that tax break early if you're making a lot of money and then pay taxes later
when your tax bracket is hopefully lower.
So we don't know what future tax rates are going to be.
And if you're scared about future tax rates, then looking at the Roth is also a great option
because it's going to allow you to not have to worry about future tax rates.
If we get tax 50%, for example, something crazy happens over the course of the next 30 years,
you don't have to worry about that.
Obviously, that's probably not going to happen.
But that's just drastic example of where you don't have to worry about it.
If you're worried about that stuff, Roth is another great thing to research more on.
So that's how I think about those two.
It really depends on your income and how much you make.
We have a whole episode on this where we dive way, way, way deeper than what I'm doing now.
So if you want to check that out, definitely check that out.
But if you're looking at Roth and you're contributing to both of them, which there's nothing wrong, contributing to both, I max out pre-tax and post-tax.
So I contribute to both.
So if you look at it and you say to yourself, hey, this makes sense in one scenario or another,
then I would get the match at whichever scenario makes more sense.
If I'm making less than 32% AGI, I'm probably considering the Roth for my match.
Because for me personally, I just love the Roth for a lot of different reasons, but that's one of the
main ones is that tax-free growth.
And I don't have to worry about taxes and retirement because last thing I want to do is worry
about anything in retirement, obviously when I'm fully retired, meaning like when I'm in my 60s,
all that kind of stuff.
I don't know if I'm ever going to retire from this, though, so we'll see.
But that is the main thing that I would look at.
Oh, one other thing I want to do is I ran a scenario that showed you this.
So when you look at this, a real world example, what I did.
was over time, I said, what if you just put $1,000 into your 401K? Now, if you max it out,
it's going to be a lot more money, but what if you just put $1,000 per month in there? And you had
a 10% rate of return and you allowed this thing to compound over the course of 35 years. Now,
when it comes to financial planning, one thing I want to note is I put 10% rate of return in here
to kind of motivate you guys. I want you guys when you run these numbers to make sure that
you were thinking through this conservatively. So if I was running a scenario where we were
talking one-on-one, for example, I'd run at 7, 8, somewhere in that percentage range. So,
that you get realistic numbers. I'm running 10% to show you the power of compound interest if you
actually got a 10% rate of return. And I'm just running them on the podcast as historical returns.
The reason for that is because that's all I got to go off of. I don't know what's going to happen in the future.
So I'm just running the historic returns or getting close to them so that you can figure out what it is.
But if you're running your own simulations on your retirement plans, try to run them conservatively so
that you have a safe option there. But anyways, 10% rate of return over the course of 35 years,
if you put $1,000 per month into your 401k, you would end up with $3 million.
$398,791. And we will have this on the screen so that you can see on YouTube if you're watching
on YouTube. And so your total contributions during that time frame would be $420,000. So that's the amount of
money that you put in. And your total interest would be $2,978,791. Now, why is this powerful?
I want you to think about this for a second. Over the course of 35 years, you contributed $420,000.
And it grew an additional $2.9, almost $3 million. You could have.
$3 million completely tax-free because you had it in a Roth 401k. And that is really, really powerful
to think about by investing that much money. It's also really cool to see how far $1,000 can go over
the course of 35 years with minimal contributions. Imagine if it went to 40 or 45 years. You have a really
long time horizon. So really important to invest early because you get these compounding returns
over time. And the longer time horizon that you have, the more powerful this can become.
so it's amazing what you can do with this money if you actually start super, super early.
So imagine having $3 million tax free in retirement.
Oh boy, you'd be sitting high on the hog on that one.
So really, really excited for you guys to check out some of the new stuff that we have coming out.
We have some great episodes that we are working on and building out.
Have some amazing frameworks to answering some of your questions.
All my frameworks I build out based on what I personally do.
So I want you guys to look at that.
Everything is based on what we do here.
So I'm super, super, super excited for some of those future episodes.
Make sure you subscribe to the podcast if you're not so that you can check out some of the future episodes that we're doing.
We're going to be diving deeper into this stuff, talking more about some of these future things and other wealth building things as well.
So hope you guys got value to this episode.
Thank you so much for listening.
And thank you for investing in yourself because that's what you're doing when you listen to this podcast is you're investing in the most important thing, which is yourself.
Listen, hope you guys learned a ton and we will see you on the next episode.
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