TorchtheFlyingTiger

Attention whore. He's not doing this due to high gas prices. It's recreational culture thing. See his hat?
"212 Boyz is an Atlanta-based renegade mini-bike and motor enthusiast club. The group is known for organizing large-scale, high-energy city ride-outs where hundreds of riders gather to showcase and race modified mini-bikes and small displacement motorcycles (such as Coleman or Baja models featuring 212cc engines).What you need to know:The Culture: The group celebrates the "Mini Bike Life" movement, emphasizing custom builds, modified exhausts, and performance upgrades.Activities: They frequently host massive organized street ride-outs across Atlanta.The "212" Name: The moniker references the popular 212cc Predator gas engines (commonly found at [Harbor Freight]"

Not OP's situation but illustrates the cummulative long term costs of AUM.

OP probably needs professional advice at least to get started. I would just steer him away from EJ. There are plenty of more reputable lower cost providers. Even knowledgeable DIYers can benefit from advisor services especially during transition from accumulation to retirement.

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Why do any of these women get married?

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To fulfill their "look at me" big wedding fantasies and financial security. Obviously not able to think of long term consequences over immediate personal gratification.

Warren Buffet seems to have figured out how to placate the impatient wife. He still lives in same home he bought in 1958 for equivalent of $329k today. Despite being worth $143B now. Of course, he has other properties elsewhere.

I've found both wife and I have less desire to spend now that it is our own hard earned $ and growth rather than easy to access credit. I'm now trying to convince her to spend more (while buying less bargain stuff we don't need.)

Assuming exact same contribution is cheating. To be accurate, you start both scenarios with an equal amount of $ available to invest. Then account for up front taxes on Roth (lower net contribution) versus 100% going into traditional but account for taxes on back end.

When you do this the growth period and rate.of return are the same constant for both scenarios and the outcome is predicated on the variable tax rate not growth period.

Many think the longer it grows the better outcome for Roth but that's just inaccurate. (until you layer in complexities such as IRMAA, RMDs etc where Roth has distinct advantages later in life not because of the growth period itself)

I'll never reccomend anyone work with EJ. Its bad enough they charge AUM fees and sometimes high cost funds. They may put your $ in proprietary funds you cant just transfer over to another broker. There's plenty of examples in every thread where EJ is brought up. I wont take my chances when there are services available through discount brokers or better yet fee for service fiduciaries you can pay to build a plan and walk you through it.

Isn't effective rate useful to capture result of "If I go an additional X, what is my Y cost?"

Unless you assume the entire withdrawal falls in owners top marginal rate. Seems relevant to me when comparing withdrawal rate to tax rate on next dollar contributed at today's tax rate. Same for Roth conversion analysis.

My issue which spawned this thread is frustration with the over confident folks that repeatedly espouse notions such as Roth beats Traditional because of time value of money, the longer you have for growth better Roth is vs traditional (someone disagreed with me for this reason just this am and said they didnt bother watching the video), or 22% on smaller contributions beats paying 12% on withdrawals.

You cant get the nuanced optimization complexities right starting from a flawed foundation. My intent was to share a tool that helps illustrate that critical math foundation instead of debating what people think is best which most of us can agree is highly situational dependent.

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EDIT: Communist downvoters persist

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I'm not in the least. I down voted because of your echoing the theme that it takes "good luck." Other than the luck we all enjoy here of being in US at this time, I'd say it has very little to do with good luck. I did this with nothing but disciplined index investing, no company match and zero head start or family financial assist other than a few hundred $ here and there as a college student. All on single income most this time for a family of 4 on an above average but not high income. Discipline, reasonable frugality, and an early start is what it took. Anyone with a decent income over past 25 years could have done this.

That's the thing, given same growth period and tax rate on contributions and withdrawals it is break even. You start with a smaller net contribution in Roth after accounting for taxes up front. Of course if you selectively ignore that reality and assume equal net contribution you'd always be better off paying no tax at the end. Time in this equation is a constant. Just watch the video and perhaps you'll understand instead of disagreeing based on flawed logic and misunderstanding.