Which is Better a 529 or Roth IRA for Your Kids? Money Q&A

Transcript:

On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, which is better, a Roth I R a or a 5 29 plan for investing for your kids.

What's up everybody, and welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. I'm your host Andrew, founder of Master money.co. And today on the Personal Finance podcast we're gonna be talking about which is better, the 5 29 plan. Or the Roth i r a for your kids. And this is a money q and a episode. So we have a bunch of other questions as well.

If you guys have any questions, make sure to hit us up on Instagram or TikTok at Master Money Co and follow us on Spotify, apple Podcasts, or whatever podcast player you love listening to this podcast on it. If you wanna help out the show, leave a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

And don't forget to check us out on YouTube. You can look at the Androgen Cola YouTube channel. We got our YouTube videos and we have our podcast videos on there as well. Now today we're gonna be going through a number of different questions here, including the first one, which is better, a 5 29 plan or a Roth I r a for kids.

Secondly, why does money not compound more in one account than it does in other accounts? 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 4 0 1 K or the Roth 4 0 1 K based on a number of different scenarios. We're gonna 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 into this episode.

So without further ado, let's get into it. All right, so the first one is, which is better, a 5 29 plan or a Roth I r a 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 I r a and the 5 29 plan have two very different.

Purposes. So the Roth I r a 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 5 29 plan is typically used for education expenses. Now there are some things that you can do with a 5 29 plan, and there are some things that you can do with a Roth I r A that are very special, including, for example, The Legacy 5 29 Plan, there's a lot of ways that you can use a 5 29 plan, which we're gonna have an entire episode on, on how you can actually get 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 5 29 plan as they 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 5 29 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 I r a. So the Roth i r a, when it comes to your kids is you have to open what is called a custodial. Roth I r a now with a custodial Roth I r a.

The way that this works is that the parents go and open the custodial Roth I r a, and then the beneficiary of that custodial Roth I r A is your child, but this is mainly used for retirement savings. The way the Roth I R A 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 I r A 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, I r a, not you. Your children have to have earned income to open a custodial Roth I r a, so you can't open one up for your newborn baby and start contributing to it because they have no earned income unless they're 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 working your own businesses. Now, one thing you wanna note, my accountant always, always talks about this 'cause people try to take advantage of this.

If you're paying your children, you wanna make sure that the pay actually fits the job. Because if you're paying somebody. A thousand dollars an hour to mop your floors, that's not gonna work with the i R s. 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 gonna 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 number of different things that you can do, you can pay them in your business in order 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? I a 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 three, you can contribute three. If they own 6,500, you can contribute 6,500.

It just depends on how much money. They are contributing. Now, the beautiful thing about the Roth I r a 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? 'cause 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, I R a, because they have those limits of contributions 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 gonna 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 gonna be the growth of that money. Only 15% is gonna be your contributions. And so it's like $850,000 is gonna be completely tax free. And if they have a longer time horizon, these Roth IRAs are gonna 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 to, they're 60.

Even if you get like 1500 bucks a year into that account, all of a sudden what's gonna happen is they're gonna have a Roth I r a with like 6 million bucks in it. And so this is really, really powerful stuff that you could be doing for your children by having this Roth I R A. Now, one reason why this is being compared is because there's a couple of different things that you can do with a Roth I R A.

You can use a Roth I r A 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 I R A. Whereas if you go to the 5 29 plan, you're gonna have a lot more flexibility around these education expenses than you would inside the Roth I r a.

But you can use money in a Roth i r a for education expenses. You can also withdraw contributions at any point in time, meaning that if you contribute a thousand dollars per year into your Roth, I r a. 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 outta there penalty free, but they cannot pull any of the gains outta there until they turn age 59 and a half, unless it's for very specific things. So there's other things you can pull it out for, like medical expenses if you, your income's at certain limits. There's a bunch of other stuff there.

But the Roth I r A has a lot of flexibility. But I would not use it as my primary education account. So if that's your thought process, if you're thinking through, Hey, maybe my Roth I r a could be my primary education account, not the route ya boy would go with. Instead, the way I do it is the Roth I r a is gonna be a wealth building account.

A taxable brokerage is another wealth building account that we're using. And the 5 29 plan, which we'll get into right now, is youth for education expenses. So, 5 29 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 wanna go into the trades and they wanna 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 5 29 plans. They got the goods. When it comes to education expenses, most people, we don't know what's gonna 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 study show that people who have a college degree earn more money.

Now, if you have a business that you're gonna hand down to your children and it is a really good cash flowing, sustainable business, you taught them, you're really confident in them taking over that business. Awesome. If they wanna 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, $200,000 per year. So it just depends on what you're doing and what type of education expenses you wanna take advantage of. But if you want them to go to private school, you can use this for private school.

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 I r A, 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, I r A, you need to invest that money after it's in the Roth I r A. The Roth I r a is not an investment. The same goes for the 5 29 plan. You wanna make sure that you are investing those dollars so they can grow over time, so you have more money in the 5 29 plan when it comes to making sure that you have those qualified medical expenses.

Now, contribution limits vary by state because a 5 29 plan 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 5 29 plans and see which one's the best. Now, I don't like the very state specific ones.

Like for example, I live in Florida. Our 5 29 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 5 29 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 5 29 plan, I'll let 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 5 29 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 I r a, you have to do a backdoor Roth I r a, which we talk about a lot here, or a mega backdoor Roth I r A, which we have an episode coming up on.

Get excited for that one 'cause that one is gonna be powerful and you gotta make sure that when you have these accounts opened up, you understand these income limits. There are no income limits to a 5 29 plan, so you anybody can contribute to 'em. 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 5 29 plan.

And then the penalties and a 5 29 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 from non-education expenses, you'll generally have to pay income taxes and a 10% penalty on the earnings portion. The withdrawal. Now we have a 5 29 episode that we did where we ran the numbers on this.

And even if you invested those dollars over timeframe, you would still come out on top by paying the penalty and by paying the taxes. If you put the money in a 5 29 plan, because it's invested instead of saving it in cash. So if you're gonna 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 5 29 plan to a Roth I r A for the beneficiary. So it has to be in the beneficiary's name. So if you open this custodial Roth i r a for your kids, once they have earned income, you can actually transfer money into their Roth I r a from the 5 29 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 5 29 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 gonna 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 5 29 plans. So, I want you to understand that even if you are worried about your kids 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 wanna go to college, you're retired, you're financially free. 'cause 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 5 29 plan.

You can take classes, college classes overseas where you're living in France or Spain or Italy or wherever else you wanna live, and you can study abroad as an adult and spend that money on the 5 29 plan so you can learn something new. Maybe you just wanna go have some amazing experience where you live somewhere for six months, your boarding is gonna be covered by the 5 29 Plan.

Your books, your tuition, and you wanna 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 5 29 plan.

'cause you put your hard earned dollars in there, why not 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 like that. There's even more stuff that you can go through, but that's just one example. But there's a lot of cool stuff like that that you can do with a 5 29 plan.

A lot of creative stuff as well. So you just want those flexible 5 29 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, uh, most of the state specific ones have a lot of parameters that make them restrictive, and you can invest a lot of 'em.

So between those two things, those are the two major things that I definitely want you to check out, and we're gonna 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 gonna be diving deep into some of these really, really deep strategies on. Things like this, like this 5 29 plan. What are some really creative ways that you could spend the money in the 5 29 plan? And every week on the Mastermind newsletter, we give you some deep dive. I'm literally writing it and I give you deep dives on stuff.

We give you the best news of the week, the best financial news of the week that's gonna help you. And we go through all different tactics. Plus we have a book club. In the Mastermind newsletter. So we have the High Performance Book Club where I show you what book I'm reading every single week. You can read along with it as well and give you a bunch of other nuggets, freebies, contests, all that kind of stuff in the Mastermind newsletter.

Really excited with some of the stuff that we're gonna be doing there, so make sure you subscribe, linked up, down below so that you can learn how to master your money. Alright, 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 gonna 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 spreading 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 gonna be the number one factor to tell you how much wealth you're gonna be building over timeframe. 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 return is gonna 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 com 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, lemme just give you 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 is $20. 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 bucks, so it doesn't matter. You spread 'em 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've $242 and the two accounts would each have $121. Combine those two together, 2 42, 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 gonna double your money roughly every seven years. This is the rule of 72. We've talked about the rule of 72. It does not matter if you've got $10, $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 gonna figure out how fast that money's gonna double. It does not matter if it goes into various accounts or if it's in one account. 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. Doesn't matter if they're all in one account or if they're separated across a bunch of different accounts.

Alright. Number three. My employer offers both a traditional 4 0 1 K and a Roth 4 0 1 K match. 100% up to 6%, meaning that they match 100% of whatever you're contributing up to 6%. I'm 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 4 0 1 k. Okay. So this is basically a question of choosing between traditional 4 0 1 K and Roth 4 0 1 k. And a lot of times this is gonna 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 'cause the tax-free growth 'cause I don't have to worry about future taxes now.

There's a number of factors that I wanna talk about here that we could talk about, but if you've never heard of a Roth 4 0 1 K, you've only heard of the Roth I a maybe. 'cause we talked about at the top of the show here, Roth 4 0 1 K 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 4 0 1 K, but your employer has to offer it for you to take advantage of our Roth 4 0 1 K if you're self-employed. You can do a solo Roth 4 0 1 K, 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 money, so when you withdraw the money, you're not gonna get tax on that income. You're not gonna get on that income whatsoever. Whereas if you had a traditional 4 0 1 k, the way that that works, 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 4 0 1 k. The money grows and then when you pull the money out, you're gonna get taxed on that money and it's gonna 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 gotta start taking this money outta this account. We're gonna issue you what is called a required minimum distribution, and you have to start taking money out of your 4 0 1 k 'cause I want my tax money.

I wanna get my money out of the contributions that you put in here, whereas the Roth 4 0 1 K, there are no required minimum distributions. You can let that bad boy compound for as long as you want to. Woo. Boy, I love flexibility. You know, I love financial flexibility, and when it comes to the Roth 4 0 1 K, 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 4 0 1 K, 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 rough. 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 Mastermind 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 wanna be paying a ton of taxes in retirement, and your 4 0 1 k is qualified as income. If you have rental income coming in, that's also income. So these are things that you really gotta think about when you start to plan out your retirement on how you actually wanna do this stuff.

Now, if you have an employer who offers a Roth 4 0 1 K now and you've been contributing to a traditional 4 0 1 k, You can start contributing to the Roth and you can do some backdoor Roth stuff with your 4 0 1 K later on. There's a lot of cool things that you can do. We'll talk about that in, uh, 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. I. 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's really depends on your A G I or your adjusted gross income. And in your A G I, you need to understand, you know, what is my adjusted gross income? And if your a G I is like 32% or above, then I would start to consider the traditional 4 0 1 K so that you can get the tax break now.

'cause you're making a lot of money and so you wanna 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 gonna 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 in over the course of the next 30 years. You don't have to worry about that. Obviously that's probably not gonna happen, but that's just drastic example of where you don't have to worry about it. That 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 wanna 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 IMAX 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% a G i, I am 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 regrowth and I don't have to worry about taxes and retirement.

'cause last thing I wanna do is worry about anything in retirement, obviously when I'm fully retired, meaning like when I'm in my sixties, seventies, all that kind of stuff. I dunno if I'm ever gonna retire from this though. So we'll see. But that is the main thing that I would look at. Oh, one other thing I wanna 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 a thousand dollars into your 4 0 1 k? Now if you max it out, it's gonna be a lot more money. But what if you just put a thousand dollars 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 wanna 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 are thinking through this conservatively. So if I was running a scenario where we were talking one-on-one, for example, I'd run at seven, eight, 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 'em on the podcast as historical returns. The reason for that is because that's all I gotta go off of. I don't know what's gonna happen in the future, so I'm just running the historic returns or getting close to 'em 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 4 0 1 k, you would end up with $3,398,791, 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 timeframe 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 4 0 1 k, and that is really, really powerful to think about by investing that much money.

It's also really cool to see how far a thousand dollars 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. Ooh 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're subscribed to the podcast if you are not, so that you can check out some of the future episodes that we're doing.

We're gonna be diving deeper into this stuff, talking more about some of these future things and 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 'cause 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.