As much as I hate to send you to Reddit, the r/personalfinance flowchart is hard to beat for most people. I’d recommend you start there to make sure you’re not overlooking something like your emergency fund.
Is there a reason to focus on 401k (beyond the employer match) before HSA? Isn’t HSA more tax savings advantageous, even if just limited to health care expenses?
I’m not certain why they have HSA after 401k and IRA, but some possible things I can think of:
HSAs can be harder to take advantage of of the triple tax benefit if you’re retiring early (that is, still younger and healthier)
HSAs probably have worse investment options than an IRA
Allowing the user to optimize their Roth vs Traditional mix
Again, I don’t really know because you’re right about the HSA triple tax advantage making it seem better than IRA or 401k, but I’m sure there was a reason given if you care to trawl the subreddit.
Financial advice will always be intrinsically linked to fiscal advice, and that will vary with jurisdiction. Where I live we have no 401k or medical debt, but we have other debt and investment instruments with preferential tax treatment.
Hey… hey there, I’d let you know that there are 340M Americans and 8.2B people in the World so… that’s like 4% OK… it’s… definitely “most people” because we are number 1 OK! USA, USA… /s
As much as I hate to send you to Reddit, the r/personalfinance flowchart is hard to beat for most people. I’d recommend you start there to make sure you’re not overlooking something like your emergency fund.
Link is broken for me over on infosec.pub.
Link is broken for me when I try opening it in a new tab. Something is up with imgur.
Is there a reason to focus on 401k (beyond the employer match) before HSA? Isn’t HSA more tax savings advantageous, even if just limited to health care expenses?
I’m not certain why they have HSA after 401k and IRA, but some possible things I can think of:
Again, I don’t really know because you’re right about the HSA triple tax advantage making it seem better than IRA or 401k, but I’m sure there was a reason given if you care to trawl the subreddit.
Not really if you exclude the employer match from consideration.
*Utterly irrelevant for most people
Sorted that for you. What the hell is 401k, Roth, medical debt?
Financial advice will always be intrinsically linked to fiscal advice, and that will vary with jurisdiction. Where I live we have no 401k or medical debt, but we have other debt and investment instruments with preferential tax treatment.
The main line of the flow chart is sound.
Hey… hey there, I’d let you know that there are 340M Americans and 8.2B people in the World so… that’s like 4% OK… it’s… definitely “most people” because we are number 1 OK! USA, USA… /s