Q. My wife and I are both 36-year-old federal employees. We both contribute the max contribution to our TSP accounts — $18,000. Additionally, we each invest $5,500 in separate Roth IRA life cycle mutual funds through USAA. Combined, we have about $600,000 in our TSP accounts and about $100,000 in our IRA accounts.
We live a rather frugal life, and started investing later in life due to grad school, so we are looking for ideas on additional avenues of investment when all other tax advantaged investment vehicles are maxed out. Do you have any advice for our situation?
A. I recommend the following order of priority for you retirement investing: (1) Traditional TSP contributions, (2) deductible IRA contributions, (3) Roth IRA contributions and (4) contributions to after-tax savings. For all of the non-TSP contributions, I recommend that you use exchange-traded index funds (ETF) is discount brokerage accounts.
