Optimal balence of 401K and charitable savings
Two things I would recommend doing:   I would save a minimum of 15% into retirement.  By young I will assume that you are under 30.  15K/year + company match will grow into a sick amount of money by the time you are in your 60s.  So you have a net worth that is north of 5 million.  What kind of charitable giving can you do then?  Answer:  What ever you want!  Also it could be quite a bit more then that. Get a will.  It will cost a little bit of money, but for someone like you it is important to have your wishes known.
Is there a better vehicle for this than an index fund?  Seems like a good choice to me, unless you want to protect it from market risk since it's in essence an emergency fund, in which case maybe you'd want to keep some of it in CD's. Are significant downsides to keeping the money in our name until he needs it?  The main downside would be if you had need to dole out more than the maximum annual gift exclusion amount in a single year (currently $14,000), you'd have to report it as a taxable gift on your tax return and it'd count toward your lifetime gift exclusion. You and your wife can each give a gift, and if your brother were married you and your wife could each give to both he and his spouse, so 2-4x the annual gift limit before this becomes an issue. Additionally you can pay medical/education expenses directly and that is not counted toward the annual exclusion. Are there any other considerations that we are overlooking? There's always a risk that gift-giving can create expectation and/or resentment. I'd think you'd want to make instances of giving not sound like something you planned for, but something you are sacrificing for. Not sure what the best strategy is there, every family is different when it comes to dealing with finances. This creates incentive for the employee to contribute more and increases the funds under management of the 401(k) plan. The size of the plan influences the fees that are charged in each of the funds offered. (The more assets under management, the better for those in the plan.) More importantly, 401(k) plans are not allowed to discriminate in favor of highly compensated employees. That discrimination is determined by calculating the average deferrals by your lower compensated employees and comparing them to the average deferrals of your highly compensated employees. If highly compensated employees are saving too much compared to the rest of the pack, they will have some of their contributions returned the next year (with all the tax implications of that). Forcing everyone to contribute 6% to get the full match helps the plan to not fail the discrimination test and protects the highly compensated employees from losing some of their tax deferrals. I think you're not applying the right time scale here. ESPP (Employee Stock Purchase Plan) is usually vesting every 6 months. So every half a year you receive a chunk of stocks based on your salary deduction, with the 15% discount. Every half a year you have a chunk of money from the sale of these stocks that you're going to put into your long term investment portfolio. That is dollar cost averaging. You're investing periodically (every 6 months in this case), same (based on your salary deferral) amount of money, regardless of the stock market behavior. That is precisely what dollar cost averaging is. "If you have enough earned income to cover this amount you should be all set. If I understand you correctly you proposed two transactions. The first, a withdrawal from the beneficiary IRA. Some of which is an RMD the rest is an extra withdrawal of funds.  Next, you propose to make a deposit to a combination of your IRA and your wife's IRA. As long as there's earned income to cover this deposit, your plan is fine.  To be clear, you can't ""take a bene IRA and deposit the RMD to an IRA."" But, money is fungible, the dollars you deposit aren't traceable, only need to be justified by enough earned income. A bene IRA is a great way to get the money to increase your own IRA or 401(k) deposits.  Further details - The 2016 contribution limit is $5,500 per person, so I did make the assumption you knew the $9000 deposit need to be split between the 2 IRAs, with no more than $5500 going into either one." "Your real question, ""why is this not discussed more?"" is intriguing. I think the media are doing a better job bringing these things into the topics they like to ponder, just not enough, yet.  You actually produced the answer to How are long-term capital gains taxed if the gain pushes income into a new tax bracket? so you understand how it works.  I am a fan of bracket topping. e.g. A young couple should try to top off their 15% bracket by staying with Roth but then using pretax IRA/401(k) to not creep into 25% bracket.  For this discussion, 2013 numbers, a blank return (i.e. no schedule A, no other income) shows a couple with a gross $92,500 being at the 15%/25% line. It happens that $20K is exactly the sum of their standard deduction, and 2 exemptions.  The last clean Distribution of Income Data is from 2006, but since wages haven't exploded and inflation has been low, it's fair to say that from the $92,000 representing the top 20% of earners, it won't have many more than top 25% today. So, yes, this is a great opportunity for most people.  Any married couple with under that $92,500 figure can use this strategy to exploit your observation, and step up their basis each year. To littleadv objection - I imagine an older couple grossing $75K, by selling stock with $10K in LT gains just getting rid of the potential 15% bill at retirement. No trading cost if a mutual fund, just $20 or so if stocks.  The more important point, not yet mentioned - even in a low cost 401(k), a lifetime of savings results in all gains being turned in ordinary income. And the case is strong for 'deposit to the match but no no more' as this strategy would let 2/3 of us pay zero on those gains.  (To try to address the rest of your questions a bit - the strategy applies to a small sliver of people. 25% have income too high, the bottom 50% or so, have virtually no savings. Much of the 25% that remain have savings in tax sheltered accounts. With the 2013 401(k) limit of $17,500, a 40 year old couple can save $35,000. This easily suck in most of one's long term retirement savings. We can discuss demographics all day, but I think this addresses your question.) If you add any comments, I'll probably address them via edits, avoiding a long dialog below." I was thinking to do mix of ELSS and Tax Saving FDs. But is my choice correct? Also what other options I am left with? This depends on individual's choice and risk appetite. Generally at younger age, investment in ELSS / PPF is advisable. Other options are Life Insurance, Retirement Plans by Mutual Funds, NSC, etc In the United States investing towards donation is a great idea because you can donate appreciated securities directly rather than donating cash.  Notice how much this can benefit you: So you get to both (a) donate untaxed money and then (b) deduct that unrealized money from your income total on your tax return. With the above in mind, a good strategy for investing towards this type of donation would be to pick securities that are likely to increase in market value but not likely to produce any other sort of income.  So bonds (which produce lots of interest income), or stocks with dividends, or equity mutual funds (which distribute dividends as capital gains) would all be suboptimal for this purpose. Of course, an even better strategy would be to establish a widely diversified investment portfolio without thought to future donations.  Then, once a year (or whenever), evaluate all your investments and find some where the market value has increased.  Then donate some of those shares.  No special advance planning necessary. Note that your tax consequences could be more complicated depending on your exact situation.  Read the section about Capital Gain Property in IRS Pub. 26 for all the details.  There may be special limits on the amount you can deduct.  Also, donations of short term capital gains are treated much less favorably, so make sure you donate only long term capital gain property. Once upon a time, money rolled over from a 401k or 403b plan into an IRA could not be rolled into another 401k or 403b unless the IRA account was properly titled as a Rollover IRA (instead of Traditional IRA - Roth IRAs were still in the future) and the money kept separate (not commingled) with contributions to Traditional IRAs. Much of that has fallen by the way side as the rules have become more relaxed.  Also the desire to roll over  money into a 401k plan at one's new job has decreased too --  far too many employer-sponsored retirement plans have large management fees and the investments are rarely the best available: one can generally do better  keeping ex-401k money outside a new 401k, though of course new  contributions from salary earned at the new employer perforce must be put into the employer's 401k. While consolidating one's IRA accounts at one brokerage or one fund family certainly saves on the paperwork, it is worth keeping in mind that putting all one's eggs in one basket might not be the best idea, especially for those concerned that an employee might, like Matilda, take me money and run Venezuela. Another issue is that while one may have diversified investments at the brokerage or fund family, the entire IRA must have the same set of beneficiaries: one cannot leave the money invested in GM stock (or Fund A) to one person and the money invested in Ford stock (or Fund B) to  another if one so desires.  Thinking far ahead into the future, if one is interested in making charitable bequests, it is the best strategy tax-wise to make these bequests from tax-deferred monies rather than from post-tax money. Since IRAs pass outside the will, one can keep separate IRA accounts with different companies, with, say, the Vanguard IRA having primary beneficiary United Way and the Fidelity IRA having primary beneficiary the American Cancer Society, etc. to achieve the appropriate charitable bequests. While the 55 exception noted by Joe and JB makes this less of a worry, it's worth noting that to retire early most people would need additional investments beyond a maxed out 401(k).  As most people make more money later in life it is generally worth putting what you can in a 401(k) now and later when your savings would max out a 401(k) then you can start adding money to accounts that are not tax-advantaged.  These additional funds can be used during the bridge period. Run the numbers yourself as these assumptions won't be true for all individuals, but this may be the piece you are missing. "I wrote a spreadsheet (<< it may not be obvious - this is a link to pull down the spreadsheet) a while back that might help you. You can start by putting your current salary next to your age, adjust the percent of income saved (14% for you) and put in the current total.  The sheet basically shows that if one saves 15% from day one of working and averages an 8% return, they are on track to save over 20X their final income, and at the 4% withdrawal rate, will replace 80% of their income. (Remember, if they save 15% and at retirement the 7.65% FICA /medicare goes away, so it's 100% of what they had anyway.) For what it's worth, a 10% average return drops what you need to save down to 9%. I say to a young person - try to start at 15%. Better that when you're 40, you realize you're well ahead of schedule and can relax a bit, than to assume that 8-9% is enough to save and find you need a large increase to catch up.  To answer specifically here - there are those who concluded that 4% is a safe withdrawal rate, so by targeting 20X your final income as retirement savings, you'll be able to retire well.  Retirement spending needs are not the same for everyone. When I cite an 80% replacement rate, it's a guess, a rule of thumb that many point out is flawed. The 'real' number is your true spending need, which of course can be far higher or lower. The younger investor is going to have a far tougher time guessing this number than someone a decade away from retiring. The 80% is just a target to get started, it should shift to the real number in your 40s or 50s as that number becomes clear.  Next, I see my original answer didn't address Social Security benefits. The benefit isn't linear, a lower wage earner can see a benefit of as much as 50% of what they earned each year while a very high earner would see far less as the benefit has a maximum. A $90k earner will see 30% or less. The social security site does a great job of giving you your projected benefit, and you can adjust target savings accordingly.  2016 update - the prior 20 years returned 8.18% CAGR. Considering there were 2 crashes one of which was called a mini-depression, 8.18% is pretty remarkable. For what it's worth, my adult investing life started in 1984, and I've seen a CAGR of 10.90%. For forecasting purposes, I think 8% long term is a conservative number.  To answer member ""doobop"" comment - the 10 years from 2006-2015 had a CAGR of 7.29%. Time has a way of averaging that lost decade, the 00's, to a more reasonable number." The math works out so that the 401k is still a better deal in the long term over a taxable account because of the tax-deferred growth. Let's assume you invest in an S&P 500 index fund in either a taxable investment account or a 401k and the difference in fees is .5%. I used an online calculator and a hypothetical 1k/year investment over 30 years with 4.5% tax-deferred growth vs 5% taxable and a 25% tax bracket. After 30 years the tax-deferred 401k account will have $67k and the taxable account will have $58k. The math isn't perfect -- I'm sure I'm missing some intricacies with dividends/capital gains distributions and that you'll then pay income tax on the 401k upon retirement as you drawn down, but it still seems pretty clear that the 401k will win in the long run, especially if you invest more than the 1k/year used in my example. But yeah, .84% expenses on an index fund is robbery. Can you bring that to the attention of the HR department? Maybe they'll want to look for a lower-fee provider and it's in their best interest too, if they also participate. The Trinity study looked at 'safe' withdrawal rates from retirement portfolios. They found it was safe to withdraw 4% of a portfolio consisting of stocks and bonds. I cannot immediately find exactly what specific investment allocations they used, but note that they found a portfolio consisting largely of stocks would allow for the withdrawal of 3% - 4% and still keep up with inflation. In this case, if you are able to fund $30,000, the study claims it would be safe to withdraw $900 - $1200 a year (that is, pay out as scholarships) while allowing the scholarship to grow sufficiently to cover inflation, and that this should work in perpetuity. My guess is that they invest such scholarship funds in a fairly aggressive portfolio. Most likely, they choose something along these lines: 70 - 80% stocks and 20 - 30% bonds. This is probably more risky than you'd want to take, but should give higher returns than a more conservative portfolio of perhaps 50 - 60% stocks, 40 - 50% bonds, over the long term. Just a regular, interest-bearing savings account isn't going to be enough. They almost never even keep up with inflation. Yes, if the stock market or the bond market takes a hit, the investment will suffer. But over the long term, it should more than recover the lost capital. Such scholarships care far more about the very long term and can weather a few years of bad returns. This is roughly similar to retirement planning. If you expect to be retired for, say, 10 years, you won't worry too much about pulling out your retirement funds. But it's quite possible to retire early (say, at 40) and plan for an infinite retirement. You just need a lot more money to do so. $3 million, invested appropriately, should allow you to pull out approximately $90,000 a year (adjusted upward for inflation) forever. I leave the specifics of how to come up with $3 million as an exercise for the reader. :) As an aside, there's a Memorial and Traffic Safety Fund which (kindly and gently) solicited a $10,000 donation after my wife was killed in a motor vehicle accident. That would have provided annual donations in her name, in perpetuity. This shows you don't need $30,000 to set up a scholarship or a fund. I chose to go another way, but it was an option I seriously considered. Edit: The Trinity study actually only looked at a 30 year withdrawal period. So long as the investment wasn't exhausted within 30 years, it was considered a success. The Trinity study has also been criticised when it comes to retirement. Nevertheless, there's some withdrawal rate at which point your investment is expected to last forever. It just may be slightly smaller than 3-4% per year. With painful 20/20 hindsight, I earnestly say - max it out hard.  The reason is the sheer opportunity of it.  As a young person you have time on your side - you have so many years for the earnings to compound!  It is many times more advantageous to max it out now, than fail to do so and be in your 40s trying to catch up.   Use the Roth 401K if your company supports that.  After that, max out a Roth IRA if your income is low enough to use them.  Otherwise, max out a traditional IRA (this will not be tax deductible because your income is too high), and the next day, convert it to Roth. That conversion will be tax-free since you already paid taxes on that money.  401K money is untouchable.  No one can ever take it from you - not with a lawsuit, not with bankruptcy.  As such, never give it up willingly by borrowing from it or cashing it out early, no matter how serious the problem seems in the short term. How do you invest a 401K when the market is so scary?  I found out when I became a Board member overseeing management of an endowment.  Turns out there's a professional gold standard for ultra-long-term, high growth, volatility-be-damned investing. Who knew? What is the question? Are you just trying to confirm that for self-employed, a Solo 401(k) is flexible, and a great tool to level out your tax rates? Sure. A W2 employee can turn on and off his 401(k) deduction any time, and bump the holding on each check as high as 75% in some cases. So in a tight stretch, I'd save to the match, but later on, top off the maximum for the year. To the points you listed - Your observation is interesting, but a bit long for what you seem to be asking. Keep in mind, there are 2 great features that you don't mention - a Roth Solo 401(k) flavor which offers even more flexibility for variable income, and loan provisions, up to $50,000 available to borrow from the account. My fellow blogger The Financial Buff offered an article Solo 401k Providers and Their Scope of Services that did a great job addressing this. "I think ""optimal"" is a term that needs to be better qualified - what's optimal investment for one person is not necessary optimal for another, as it depends on the investor's time horizon, risk tolerance, and investment knowledge. I would personally put fix-income (or products that generates incomes that CRA considers as ""interest"") products in the TFSA so the gains aren't taxed at all.  I would consider putting preferred shares in this account as well, since dividend incomes are taxed higher than capital gain and preferred shares don't usually change in price unless the company's ability to pay the dividends are in-doubt.  I don't want to put common equities in TFSA as that would take away your ability to leverage past losses to reduce future capital gains. If you are using TFSA as a way to accelerate saving for a near-term purchase, then you definitely want to employ fix-income products as the underlying saving vehicle, since market volatility would be your enemy (unless you are feeling very lucky).   If you are using TFSA as a way to supplement your registered retirement saving account, then you can treat it the same way you would invest in your RRSP."