401k, IRA… what else?
Thanks for taking the time to read this post. I’ve just been getting a little bit overwhelmed with planning and would like to vent/ask for advice. i’m 37 years old, making under 60k/year before taxes. Only started my 401(k) about five years ago and it’s up to $40,000. Made sure to contribute the maximum that my employer will match every year since(5%). But after doing a little research and estimating where I’ll be at retirement, I decided that I needed to open up an IRA rather than contribute more to my 401(k). With where I am it just seems like a better idea so I’m at present $200 invested into my new IRA and slowly but surely will max it out by the end of the year. However, I’m still pretty scared. I won’t give you a family history, but I can probably assume that by the time I turned 50 I’m gonna need to slow down how much I am working. I’m trying to get a shit load of overtime so that way I can max out my IRA, increasing the amount that my employer matches per paycheck, and then trying to rebuild an emergency fund after I recently bought a car.
So I’m trying to set a midway goal for myself to put myself in the financial position where I only need to work 30 hours a week after I turned 50.
I wanna believe that in the 12 years between now and then I can save somewhere between 300,000 and $400,000. But I don’t know what to do with that money not only in between, but once I have it.
My first thought was to get to a certain point and open a high-yield savings account and dump it all in there and what would hopefully be 4% would make up for the difference I will not be getting between working 30 hours and 40 hours. 8k-10k
Then I thought about all the posts I read in here. And thought I should ask if opening up a taxable brokerage account and investing in some combination of ETF’s would be a better way to use that money and achieve roughly the same goal of being able to make up $8000-$12,000.
I’m well aware that there is no magical ETF that will get me there as a sure thing but I thought I would ask for some help.