Should you convert a traditional IRA into a roth IRA
Beginning this year, people can convert all or a portion of their traditional IRA balances into Roth IRAs. Although this new allowance for conversions applies explicitly to traditional IRAs, it also applies indirectly to balances in 401(k) plans that workers hold with former employers. These old 401(k) balances can be rolled over, with no penalty, into traditional IRA accounts, which in turn can be converted to Roth IRAs.
Pre-Retirement Planning
I would like to begin with a brief discussion of the broader picture that is, major demographic changes in the U.S. general population as well as in our laborforce. First of all, there is no question that the American population is "greying," i.e., achieving a minimum of 55 years of age, which according to some authors, (U.S. Department of Public Health, 1983) places them in one of these four categories: 1211
Pedagogy of the “Not”: Negation, Exodus, and Postdigital Temporal Regimes
Postdigital capitalist time is an incessant acceleration that acts to homogenize time and wed us to the present, to which we have to constantly catch up. While the impulse of this is no doubt economic (the realization of value), it is crucially undergirded by a pedagogical logic wherein we have to perpetually learn and re-learn the latest apps, social media configurations, operating systems, and so on. Political strategies of resistance thus need to be bolstered by an alternative mode of educational life, and I propose a pedagogy of the “not” as one possibility. Such a pedagogy is an act of suspension that sustains a detachment from the present, clearing out oppositions and thereby exposing us to a radical indeterminacy and potentiality that is always untimely. Suspension is the praxis of negation, which means that negation operates by keeping sense indeterminate to meaning and signification. Rather than suppressing, disavowing, or annihilating the stated content, negation retains even that which is negated. While this would appear as a form of exopedagogy, which withdraws from the dialectic of the private/public, I instead argue that it redefines the terms of any dialectic, redefining the very categories exopedagogy withdraws from. Before concluding, I spend some time with Sandy Grande’s important critiques of Eurocentrism and progress in Western critical education, demonstrating how negation as suspension circumvents these errors through its accommodation of—or, better, insistence on—variegated temporalities and forms of life.