I think a lot of this depends on your distribution of potential futures:
What sort of returns (or inflation) do you expect, in worlds where you need the money at various ages?
What future legal changes do you expect?
How likely are you to have a 5y warning before you’ll want to spend the money you’ve put in a traditional 401k?
What are your current and future tax brackets?
How likely are you to be in a situation where means testing means you lose a large portion of non-protected money?
How likely are you to lose a lawsuit for more than your (unprotected) net worth or otherwise go bankrupt?
The first version of this post (which I didn’t finish) tried to include a modeling component, but it gets very complex and people have a range of assumptions so I left it as qualitative.
I think a lot of this depends on your distribution of potential futures:
What sort of returns (or inflation) do you expect, in worlds where you need the money at various ages?
What future legal changes do you expect?
How likely are you to have a 5y warning before you’ll want to spend the money you’ve put in a traditional 401k?
What are your current and future tax brackets?
How likely are you to be in a situation where means testing means you lose a large portion of non-protected money?
How likely are you to lose a lawsuit for more than your (unprotected) net worth or otherwise go bankrupt?
The first version of this post (which I didn’t finish) tried to include a modeling component, but it gets very complex and people have a range of assumptions so I left it as qualitative.