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When I first learned about Roth IRAs and Roth 401(k) plansthe tax-advantaged retirement plans that are funded with a taxpayers after-tax incomeI remember thinking that it must be nice to have enough income that you could afford to contribute money to your retirement without an immediate tax break. But even though you fund Roth accounts with after-tax dollars, making them more expensive on the contribution side, they are ultimately a savvy way to save money in the long run. Unfortunately, if you dont know what these accounts are or how they work, you will miss out on all of their benefits. Heres everything you need to know to make the most of Roth retirement accounts in your financial plan. History of the Roth In 1997, Congress introduced a new non-deductible IRA via the Taxpayer Relief Act. Named for Delaware Senator William V. Roth (and not, as I originally believed, for Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth), these accounts were designed to give you a tax break in retirement, rather than when you make contributions. Although Roth accounts were originally restricted to IRAs, Roth 401(k) plans became available through workplace retirement accounts as of January 1, 2006. As of 2023, 93% of workplace retirement plans offered a Roth 401(k) option, according to the Plan Sponsor Council of Americas annual poll published in December 2024. Roth account rules and limits There are some important rules surrounding these accountsthe kind of rules that can put you on the IRSs naughty list. Specifically, there are specific income and contribution limits for Roth IRA and Roth 401(k) plans that you must not exceed. These limits can and do change from year to year. The current 2025 limits are listed in the table below. Roth IRARoth 401(k)Maximum income$150,000 for single filers; $236,000 for married couples filing jointlyNo income limitAnnual contribution limit$7,000 for those under 50; $8,000 for anyone 50+$23,500 for those under 50; $31,000 for anyone 50+; $34,750 for anyone aged 6063 One thing to remember is that these yearly contribution limits encompass all IRAs or 401(k)s you may own. For instance, if you have a traditional IRA and a Roth IRA, you cant send $7,000 to each one. (Not without waking Spike, the IRS enforcement officer who sleeps in the sub-basement). You will have to split your contributions between your traditional and Roth IRA so that your total contribution does not exceed $7,000. This is the same for your traditional versus Roth 401(k) contributions. Altogether, they cannot exceed the annual contribution limit set by the IRS. What the Roth has to offer Introducing the Roth retirement account can feel a little like when your friend busts out a board game with 178 pages of instructions while insisting its a little slow to get started, but its so worth it! However, despite the seeming complexity of Roth accounts, there are three main benefits to these retirement vehicles: Like traditional IRAs and 401(k) plans, your Roth contributions grow tax-free. Unlike traditional IRAs and 401(k) plans, any Roth withdrawals you make in retirement are 100% tax-free, provided you wait to take these distributions until after reaching age 59 or after having held the account for at least five years, whichever comes last. You will pay the IRS a 10% penalty if you take an early withdrawalbut you wont owe taxes. Also unlike traditional IRAs and 401(k) plans, there are no required minimum distributions once you reach age 73. You can keep your money in a Roth account forever if you want and take distributions of any amount at any time, as long as youre older than 59 and have held the account for at least five years. In other words, with a Roth account, for the low price of paying current income taxes, you get tax-free growth, tax-free withdrawals, and no required minimum distributions. Ripping off the tax Band-Aid Another way to look at a Roth account is to think of it as a way of paying taxes on your terms. Many young professionals are earning much less now than they will later in their careerand possibly less than they will be living on in retirement. Funding a Roth retirement plan now, while you are in a lower tax bracket, will save money later, once you have started earning a much higher income. Additionally, by putting posttax dollars aside in a Roth account today, it gives you a tax-free cushion for emergencies in retirement. Many retirees have a carefully planned tax strategy in retirement, which could be upended if they need to access a large chunk of their taxable retirement savings. Pulling $25,000 from a traditional IRA or 401(k) for a health problem or other emergency could throw a wrench in your tax plan for the year. But you can grab that money from your Roth account with no tax consequences. It may hurt to fund a Roth account with posttax dollars, but the benefits can outweigh the momentary pain. Enjoy what you have wrought in your Roth As the brainchild of Senator William V. Roth, tax-advantaged Roth accounts are unlike most traditional defined contribution plans and individual retirement accounts. Instead of deducting your contributions to these accounts from your income, you contribute money youve already paid taxes on into your Roth accounts. The money grows tax free and you can withdraw it tax-free in retirement, provided you wait until you are at least 59 or have held the account for at least five years. You also dont have to take required minimum distributions from these accounts, meaning you can leave the money there forever, if you choose. There are income and contribution limits to these accounts, which can and do change from year to year. And you should be aware that annual IRA and 401(k) contribution limits encompass all accounts you may own, including traditional and Roth versions, meaning you will have to split up your contributions among your acounts so you dont go over the limit among the various accounts. Roth accounts offer a flexible way to give yourself a tax-free source of funds in retirement. Thats a helpful gift to provide for your future self.
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E-Commerce
When we talk about phones and location sharing, were typically talking about limiting how much info overly aggressive apps can access. But theres another side to location sharingand thats actively opting to share your location with specific people (not companies!) for your own personal purposes. Whether its being able to keep tabs on kids, confirm the safety of parents or other loved ones, or simply know where a partner is at any given moment (with their permission, of course), your existing phone can turn into a powerful peace-of-mind provider and real-world life enhancer. The key is having the right software to make that happen in a way thats both helpful andjust as importantalso protective of your privacy. And thats precisely where todays Cool Tools discovery comes into play. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures! Location sharing, with a side of privacy For most folks, deliberate person-to-person location sharing tends to revolve around a few primary paths: Google Maps (or the other Google apps associated with it, on Android) Apple Maps (or the Apple Find My app, on iOS) Or Life360, a slightly pricey third-party service that people seem to have a bit of a love-hate relationship with All of these services have their strengths. But they also come with their own limitations as well as concerns around cost, privacy, and data protection. Thats why I was so intrigued to come across a new cross-platform location sharing service called Paralino. It attempts to address all of those asterisks with an offering thats all about giving you an exceptional all-around experiencewith privacy and security at the core. Specifically, Paralino promises: Complete end-to-end data encryption, so only you and the specific people you choose to share with ever see where you go No tracking, no profiling, and no ads of any sort Intricate control over exactly what info you share with anyone And the option to share and receive not only on-demand location info but also proactive alerts (with everyones permission) whenever someone in your group arrives at or exits specific places Paralino offers both on-demand location sharing and proactive location alerts. Youll need roughly two to three minutes to set it up and try it out. First, download the Paralino app. Its available for both Android and iOS, so you can put it on any phone you (or anyone else you know) might be using. Then: Open er up and follow the prompts to create an account and sign in. You can opt to skip the sign-in and use the service only as a guest, if you want, but doing so makes it impossible to move your setup to another device in the futureso creating an account is really the most advisable way to go. When the app prompts you to pick a plan, tap the x in the upper-left corner of the screen to skip over that and stick with the services standard free level for now. The free level limits you to a single group for sharing, with one other person and up to two alert-generating places. If you end up really liking the service or wanting more than what the free tier provides, you can always look into Paralinos premium planswhich range from 40 bucks a year to $70 in the U.S., depending on the specificslater down the road. But you certainly dont have to pay and can get quite a bit out of the apps free level. Once you reach the apps main screen, look for the prompts to enable all the pertinent permissions. The app will ask to be able to send you notifications, so it can actually give you the updates you want, and to be able to see your location all the timeeven when you arent actively looking at it. It obviously needs that ability to be able to do what it does, and again, its core promise is that it always keeps everything encrypted and never saves any personal data. From there, all thats left is to connect to someone else and start sharing. And then, you can always see exactly where that person isand vice-versaas well as get any alerts you both opt into about each others locations. Once you’re connected to someone, you can always see their location on a simple map in the Paralino app. Its essentially a more fully featured and privacy-minded ersion of what Google and Apple offerand a much more privacy-respecting, focused, and affordable version of what Life360 provides. And thats exactly the kind of standard-challenging, small-scale competitor I love to see show up in arenas dominated by big players. Ive been using Paralino with my wife for several days now, and so far, its seemed both easy and effectiveand true to its promises around privacy and quality. The effect on my battery life has been minimal with the services default settings, too, though it seems the app would update our locations more frequently (with the tradeoff of using more battery power) if we switched from the Balanced updating frequency to the more aggressive Best Performance path. My only real gripe is that the interface for creating an alert-generating placea specific location where you get notifications when someone arrives and/or leavesis kinda funky, with no apparent search function and instead only a clunky way to find a place by zooming around on a giant world map. Thats awkward. But that one relatively minor quirk aside, Paralino is shaping up to be a solid service and a welcome alternative to the typical options in this area. If you use any sort of location sharing already or think doing so might be beneficial for you, its well worth your while to try. Paralino is available for both Android and iOS. The company is also working on a fully open source version of its apps for the future The service is free, at its base level, with optional upgrades that lift limitations and unlock extra features. (If you do end up pursuing one of those plans at any point, youll absolutely want to look at the annual subscription optionswhich are much better values than their monthly equivalents.) And, again, this app is all about using strong encryption and avoiding so much as even seeing any manner of personal infolet alone sharing your data with anyone you dont explicitly approve. Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
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Nick Foster is not a fan of how Silicon Valley imagines the future. As a designer and writer who has spent his career at places like Google, Nokia, and Sony, hes had a front-row seat to the tech worlds relentless obsession with turning science fiction into science fact. The problem, he argues, is that the source material was never meant to be a manual for reality. The primary function of science fiction is to explore ideas and to entertain. It shouldnt be considered a brief, Foster tells me. He worries when he hears people in meetings say, We should make the thing from Minority Report. To him, its a lazy shortcutan idea taken from a cinematic universe built for drama, not for pragmatic, human-centered utility. Theyre sort of misreading the function of that art form, he says. Theyre just trying to make something happen because theyre excited by it, not necessarily because its better or more pragmatic or more useful. Foster, the author of Could Should Might Dont: How We Think About the Future, has a more than a few thoughts on what does make for good futurism. What Im trying to do…is not create a method or a framework. Weve got enough of those, he explains. Instead, he offers a simple yet powerful vocabulary to dissect the ways we approach the future, arguing that humans tend to fall into one of four modes of thinking, often without realizing it. To break free of the Silicon Valley narrative, he says, requires changing the way we think about the future of technology. Four modes of futurism Foster’s first mode of futurism is Could futurism. This is the one we know best. Its the futurism of opportunity, of amazing gadgets, humanoid robots, and breathtaking architecture. Its the world of flashy tech demos, driven by a modernist belief in endless progress. Its weakness, however, is that it has been absolutely co-opted by science fiction, creating dazzling but ultimately alienating visions that feel disconnected from our lives and the messy path to get there. [Cover Image: MacMillan] Then comes Should futurism. This is the future as a fixed destination. Its the world of master plans, and of religions and laws that point us toward a desired state. Its also the world of corporate strategists and their algorithmic projectionsthe confident dotted lines on charts that declare whats coming. The obvious flaw, Foster says, is its brittleness. The world is way more volatile than we think it is, he warns. All of our algorithmic projections and our dotted lines on charts are just stories. And often were way off. As a reaction, Might futurism offers the opposite: a future of infinite scenarios. This is the domain of strategic foresight consultants, born from Cold War-era wargaming at the RAND Corporation. Its a pluralistic view that maps out every possibility within a futures cone. But it has a fatal flaw. Our imagination about future scenarios is actually based on the past, Foster notes. This is why companies like Blockbuster could run countless scenarios and still never imagine a future where they werent dominantuntil it happened. Finally, there is Dont futurism, a mode that is gaining momentum in our anxious times. This is the future as a terrifying place to be avoided, the focus of protest movements campaigning against climate catastrophe, authoritarianism, or runaway AI. It is the future as a warning. While essential, its challenge is that it often protests from the outside and struggles to offer integrated, actionable paths forward. Its quite difficult to deliver a dont in a helpful way, Foster says, noting it can become strident and divisive. The China contrast The Wests default mode of futurism, Foster argues, is an unbalanced mix of these mindsets. But the tech industry, in particular, is overwhelmingly biased toward could futurism, driven by the commercial need to generate excitement and create market trends. Silicon Valley is blinded by sci-fi dreams, and its attitude towards the future gets worsened by Wall Street demand for growth. This stands in stark contrast to China’s approach, a country that understands future planning in a way the West cannot. Beijing just concluded the Chinese Communist Partys fourth plenary session in October, during which they outlined a 2026-2030 five-year plan, the next-to-last chapter in their decades-long overarching plan to become a leading superpower by 2035. Foster points out that while Western democracies are trapped in short cycles”its the midterms and then its the quarterly results and then its the next election”Chinas autocratic system allows it to plan on a generational scale. In a sort of autocratic dictatorship where you sort of have a dynastic leadership, you can start to think at 10, 15, 20, 30 generational scales, he observes. While acknowledging the immense human and societal cost, Foster identifies Chinas strategy as a powerful, real-world example of should futurism. The government establishes a clear destination for the country and then commits all its resources to reaching it. This gives them a stability that the West lacks. Quoting William Gibson, Foster notes you need a solid place to stand to imagine the future. China dont seem to have that problem, he tells me. Theyre very comfortable with where they want to be. And they seem to be working very hard to get there. In our conversation, Foster didn’t offer a way for the West to achieve what China is already doing. In his book, his proposed solution to fixing our vision of the future is a cultural and intellectual one, aimed at leaders within organizations, especially in technology. He believes the crucial shift is for leaders to start communicating in a more balanced way, using all four modes of his framework. He wants to see leaders who can discuss opportunity (the could), articulate a clear mission (the should), admit uncertainty (the might), and acknowledge fears and risks (the don’t). There’s no magic tricks or shortcuts. Fostering a more responsible, rigorous, and honest conversation about the future is the necessary first step toward makin better long-term decisions, regardless of the political system. To me, it seems like an impossible shift. If Western societies rarely look beyond the next quarter in the political, enterprise, and financial world; if a large number of people are living paycheck to paycheck; if even most of the entertainment and design is ephemeral and single use, how can we be balanced or really think about the future beyond what’s going to happen in the next few months? Could we have an honest future, please? Foster argues that the power of his approach is not in choosing one of these modes, but in learning to think with all of them simultaneously. He believes we need the optimism of could, the direction of should, the preparedness of might, and the caution of dont. Foster champions a concept he calls The Future Mundane. Its an antidote to the escapist fantasies of could futurism, which has been a cancer for both our future and present. Foster argues we should be grounding our visions in the messy, complex, and often boring reality of everyday life. Even the most transformative technologies, from GPS to AI, eventually become normalized and part of the mundane fabric of our lives. Hes less interested in the initial wow moment of a new technology and more in what happens next. I want to try and figure out what it all means, what it actually leads to and how it changes how somebody might walk the dog or go and buy milk or go on vacation, he tells me. This focus on the ordinary, he argues, grounds conversations about the future in a way that is not only more honest but ultimately more productive. In his book, Foster says that the value of this “Future Mundane” approach is that it forces creators to look past the initial “inspirational sugar rush” of a new idea and confront the messy, real-world consequences of its existence. By thinking about how a technology will actually integrate into the boring parts of daily lifehow it will be used, misused, repaired, and eventually become obsoletewe can build more responsible and realistic products. It grounds the conversation in a way that helps us “ride out that hysteria” of the initial hype cycle and “figure out what it all means.” Thinking about the future isnt about predicting what will happen in 2030; its an act of “pure human responsibility to our species” to consider the long-term effects of what we are building today. Foster says that companies tend to get trapped in the emotional extremes of the technology’s hype cycle. When a new technology like AI emerges, companies and their leaders tend to react in one of two “hysterical and a little unbalanced” ways. They either get swept up in the breathless optimism of could futurism (“Wow, it can do all these things”), or they become paralyzed by the fear and anxiety of don’t futurism. Foster writes that the “incessant pressure to find clients, balance the books, chase sales… and deliver results utterly dominates day-to-day affairs,” pushes any serious futurism work to the fringes where it is often seen as a “vanity” exercise rather than an integral part of the strategy. This polarization and short-term focus prevents companies from having the kind of rigorous, multifaceted conversation that leads to sustainable innovation. He doesn’t point to any company that does this right, however. My personal impression, from what I read and see every day as a journalist, is that there are not a lot of companies that think within the framework that Foster proposes. This is especially true in our current AI craze, where leading companies push the narrative that they are about honesty, responsibility, balance, and ethics. In reality, for the vast majority of companies, those are bullet points in a Powerpoint slide. Smoke and mirrors. All talk and no walk while they all are focused on the could, gunning to become the next unicorn, the next Wall Street darling. Perhaps I’m a cynic, but Foster believes that this may be an opportunity for those companies who actually want to practice a balanced, honest look at designing the future. For him, that is the path for lasting success: The company that delivers that kind of story, I think will be the company that succeeds because it addresses all of the key motivators we have about the future.
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E-Commerce
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