Re 1: This is a good point; I did the math on this at some point for myself and ended up still landing on traditional by a large margin (even though I wanted it to turn out pure Roth for simplicity). But it’ll be dependent on your expected tax rates, opportunities for low-tax conversion, and your retirement timeline (more tax-advantaged money dominates on longer timelines).
Also yeah, I skipped backdoor and mega-backdoor to keep things simple. The goal was to give people a linkable 90⁄10. The outcome I was aiming for is that people read, get the important parts of the memetic package, and then some of them will dive in more to find things like that for themselves—for instance, they’re mentioned in the flowchart I linked.
Re: tax advantages of homes, yeah . Homes are probably a better long-term expected value than I make them sound for this and other reasons. Still, transaction costs suck, and I think they stop being a good idea if you buy/sell them too often—I’ve heard you need to hold ~5 years on average to break even on transaction costs vs mortgage advantage, but haven’t done the math myself. I am biased toward the flexibility of being able to change my physical location in order to take better jobs, decrease my commutes, decide to decrease my expenses, etc. If you do buy a home, you can ameliorate these concerns by just buying a small home so that you can more easily decide to eat the proportional transaction costs if necessary.
Re: financing things at low interest rates to instead invest in the market, I agree this is correct to maximize expected value but 1. it’s not all that big of an impact for things smaller than a house or new car and 2. I think most people would do better by avoiding the over-spending tendency that credit brings, and the negative psychological effects of future spending obligations. If you’re buying a house or new car regardless and can get a low interest rate, I agree you should take out low interest debt instead of buying it with cash.
Re 1: This is a good point; I did the math on this at some point for myself and ended up still landing on traditional by a large margin (even though I wanted it to turn out pure Roth for simplicity). But it’ll be dependent on your expected tax rates, opportunities for low-tax conversion, and your retirement timeline (more tax-advantaged money dominates on longer timelines).
Also yeah, I skipped backdoor and mega-backdoor to keep things simple. The goal was to give people a linkable 90⁄10. The outcome I was aiming for is that people read, get the important parts of the memetic package, and then some of them will dive in more to find things like that for themselves—for instance, they’re mentioned in the flowchart I linked.
Re: tax advantages of homes, yeah . Homes are probably a better long-term expected value than I make them sound for this and other reasons. Still, transaction costs suck, and I think they stop being a good idea if you buy/sell them too often—I’ve heard you need to hold ~5 years on average to break even on transaction costs vs mortgage advantage, but haven’t done the math myself. I am biased toward the flexibility of being able to change my physical location in order to take better jobs, decrease my commutes, decide to decrease my expenses, etc. If you do buy a home, you can ameliorate these concerns by just buying a small home so that you can more easily decide to eat the proportional transaction costs if necessary.
Re: financing things at low interest rates to instead invest in the market, I agree this is correct to maximize expected value but 1. it’s not all that big of an impact for things smaller than a house or new car and 2. I think most people would do better by avoiding the over-spending tendency that credit brings, and the negative psychological effects of future spending obligations. If you’re buying a house or new car regardless and can get a low interest rate, I agree you should take out low interest debt instead of buying it with cash.