Taking money
out of your retirement account early is a slippery slope.
So simply taking money
out of your retirement accounts early and paying the penalty is a viable option and has the following pros and cons:
Not exact matches
If you are in a financial pinch and considering taking money
out of your 401k or any other
retirement savings
account, here are seven times it's OK to dip into your
retirement fund
early.
You started saving
early to take advantage
of the power
of compounding, maxed
out your 401 (k) and individual
retirement account (IRA) contributions every year, made smart investments, squirreled away money into additional savings, paid down debt and figured
out how to maximize your Social Security benefits.
As far as investing, our plan
of action is to continue maxing
out retirement accounts, while saving for the house and fulfilling the rest
of the buckets we deem necessary to retire
early.
When you close or take money
out of a
retirement account before the guidelines allow it, you typically have to pay ordinary income tax, plus an
early withdrawal penalty.
Because if you are like us and have other funds to live on for the initial years
of early retirement (our taxable brokerage
account in particular), then you can rollover funds from your Traditional IRA to Roth IRA slower and drag it
out over many years since income up to $ 28,900 is all tax free (the combo
of deduction and exemptions).
If you took it
out of an IRA or a
retirement account, you would not only pay tax on it, you would also pay penalties for
early withdrawal.
Withdrawing money
early from your
retirement accounts — that is, borrowing against your 401k or IRA — carries heavy financial consequences, but sometimes the benefit outweighs the cost
of taking
out a 401k loan.
Another method I didn't even consider until recently is to just pay the 10 %
early - withdrawal penalty and take money
out of your
retirement accounts whenever you need it.
So let's review those first three statements: • I don't use
retirement accounts because I don't want my money trapped until I'm 60 (wrong: you can take
out contributions at any time, and you can get qualified distributions
early for capital gains) • I'm gonna buy a house in two years, so I opened a Roth IRA today because I can use all that money for my first house (wrong: you can take
out your contributions, but any capital gains would not be qualified distributions because the
account wasn't open for five years) • You can only use $ 10,000
of your Roth for your first house (wrong: You can take
out 100 %
of your contributions, plus $ 10,000
of your capital gains if the
account has been funded for five years.