I'm using it to save taxes, because I'm not sure what are the alternatives. You're comment makes me feel I should be less ignorant: any good online reading to suggest?
You can also open an IRA on your own and stuff that to the limit every year. Again there is a Roth version, which you can dip into for certain things before retirement age without penalty, and never pay tax on the withdrawal because tax was paid already going in.
Another thing to look into is if your employer can offer an HSA qualifying health care plan. You get a tax deduction on the front end when funding the HSA, and it can grow tax free, with tax free withdrawals for qualifying medical expenses - the trick is to never use it while you're working. Just pay co-pays, and deductible amount from pocket, instead of from the HSA. Use the HSA later to pay the things Medicare doesn't (which is a lot).
The best way to avoid taxes is to make the maximum possible contribution every year now while you can.
https://www.rothira.com/roth-ira-limits
and/or
https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/2017-ira-deduction-limi...
I can't contribute to my old Roth but I have a trad IRA I can legally contribute to.
One interesting point to make is to some extent its all a waste of time; the annual contribution limit for Roth or Trad IRAs is less than the monthly cost of my Uncles nursing home; all you're going to do by investing in IRAs is make some middleman slightly richer before you go on full government assistance; the IRA is not going to last long and your body is going to last longer. The purpose of "the system" is to get all your money before you die, so struggling to accumulate more merely means you'll get some rich guy a bonus for taking lots of your money as opposed to little of someone elses money.
There are no weird income or investment limitations on plain old investment accounts, which is why my plain old brokerage account is something like 10x larger than my two IRAs. Likewise my MiL is using her suburban house as her retirement account, more or less. Also the fedgov thinks people retire at 65, every single person, which is comical; due to ageism in my field I need a way to get an income for decades before I am 65 so IRAs that limit access for decades are kinda stupid to invest in unless you're in a "pocketwatch and lifetime sinecure position" job where you can reasonably expect to retire from that single lifetime employer at 65...
> due to ageism in my field I need a way to get an income for decades before I am 65…
Yeah, my thinking is the same, so for the past year I've been working on a framework I could use to swing trade futures via an online brokerage.
So far in my backtests from the end of 2004 to mid 2017 (about 12.7 years) I'm getting and avg return of %5.5, avg volatility of %6.8, and worst draw down of %9.7 percent.
Still trying to improve things, but I hope to hook it up an brokerage api, and monitor it on autopilot in the next year or so, but compared to the stats of the S&P 500 and the risk to get those returns during the same timeframe, I'm thinking about doing this sooner rather than later with where I'm at now.
As an individual, I don't think I can just compete with the insider dealing and foreign CB buy-and-hold of the s&p 500 with a passive strategy… so for me, I think the odds are evened out in the futures market.