If you're in 22 now, do you think you'll most likely be in a lower one when you retire and be drawing less money out to live on than you do now (not considering inflation) or in a higher one?

If higher, you'd want to lean towards a roth.
A good time to do a roth for example is when you are young and are in a very low tacket bracket.
You can put it in then after its been taxed at that very low rate, but draw it in retirement and it will have already been taxed.

If lower, then you'd want to lean towards traditional.
Traditonal is usually better if you think youll be in a lower bracket than you are now and drawing less to live on when you retire than you do now. That money goes in before being taxed and doesn't get taxed until you withdraw it. Kind of anyway... you'll put it in after tax, but report on your taxes that you contributed x amount to a traditional IRA for the past year and the taxes on that amount will be returned to you/deducted from what you owe. Then they will tax it when you withdraw it in retirement.

If I had to guess based on what you said, I would think you'd want to go traditional.

Once you roll it in to the IRA ( I would do fidelity personally especially since you already have an account with them - I use them and really like them, they also have great customer service and will advise you if you like) then you'll need to invest it and set it up to reinvest the gains and dividends. A S&P follower like FXAIX or VOO would mostly likely still be good for you now. It would be good enough for a while for sure until you have more time to do some more research or get with in advisor in a year or so. Both of those have very low expense ratio fees and fidelity has no trading fees that it charges for investing it those.

You can roll both of those into one traditional Ira with fidelity (no limits for rolling) and then contribute to it yearly every year going forward (but there is a limit to that amount-7000 this year for 49 and younger, 8000 for 50 and older). If you're married, your wife can also have her own IRA and you can help her contribute to hers if needed. So together if under 50 you could pack away 14k a year together. Those limits usually go up about 500 every year. So next year it will probably be 7500.

Hope that helps, with your new job not having a 401k you probably need to really be thinking about an IRA and learning about using it (at least for future contributions even if you don't roll over your 401ks).

This post was edited on 4/23/24 at 3:21 pm