3 Retirement Accounts to Max Out in Your 20s

If you are under the age of 30 right now, you have a big advantage financially that older people don't have. And you're also wrong about the biggest expense in your life. So we're going to cover both those things and how you can save hundreds of thousands of dollars on average over the course of your life. Let's go. Now, before we continue, I want to talk about something that's changing how people go about research and content. Now, the problem with most AI tools right now is that they're great at generating text. But on the research front, if you ask Chakchipiti or Claude to go and research something, they give you generic responses with no sources, outdated information or straight up hallucinations. And if you need to create a report, a presentation or a data analysis based on that information, you're copy and pasting into Google Docs, you're manually formatting slides and really just hoping that that information is accurate. And that's why these Skyworks super agents are different. Skyworks is an AI company that's been developing open source multimodal foundation models, and they just launched Skyworks super agents. And that's the world's first AI workspace suite built on deep research. And so Skyworks is built on actual open source research grade AI. They've been releasing their open source models on GitHub and Hugging Face. That's models like Skyworks R1 V3, Skyworks Reward V2 and Skyworks MOE. And these aren't consumer chatbots. These are models designed for professionals and researchers who need accuracy in depth above all. And so the Skyworks super agent suite and platform is powered by these proprietary LLMs that they developed in-house. And more specifically, these agents do deep research by default, fully automatically. When you give Skyworks a prompt, it doesn't just go and generate text from its training data, which is how most machine learning or large language models work. Instead, it surfaces 10 times more sources than competitors, pulls real time information and traces every claim back to source material for actual inline citations. And if you work in research or you've ever done citations and anything that needs it, you know how laborious and time intensive, but also important that part of the process is. So you're not just generating and relying upon AI generated floss. You're getting verifiable research backed information. Okay. And third, and this is the crazy part, it generates entire workspaces from a single prompt. So you can create docs, slides, sheets, web pages, and even podcasts from that one prompt. And every output is fully editable and exportable to PDF, PowerPoint, Excel, or Google workspace formats. And from a technical standpoint, Skyworks ranks number one on the GAIA benchmark with a score of 82.42 and number one on Simple QA with 94.5. And those are benchmarks that measure real world reasoning and actual factual accuracy, not just how fluent the text sounds. And they've also built native visual generation into the model. So if you're creating a report with data, Skywork will auto-render charts and visualizations based on its research. And likewise, if you're building say a pitch deck, it will generate slides with the proper design and visualization, not just the raw text on the slide. And here's the enterprise piece. Skywork supports private knowledge basis. You can upload your own proprietary documents and Skywork will use those as sources to reduce hallucinations and generate content that is accurate to your company's internal data. And finally, again, Skyworks models are completely open source. This is actual open AI. So the code, the weights, the training data, it's all publicly available again on GitHub and Hugging Face. And that means you're not locked into a black box. You can actually see and understand exactly how these models work. And if you're an enterprise, you can fork and or fine tune them based on your own data and what matters to you. So that all in mind, Skywork gave me just 50 discount spots. You can use the link below to get up to 20% off. And again, that's going to fill up fast. That is just 50 spots for the people watching this video. And fun fact, Skywork runs on Nano Banana Pro, but it costs less than Nano Banana Pro itself. For those 50 people, after the discount, you're talking less than $13.5 per month, which at least here in Boston is the price of a coffee. So whether you're a researcher who needs verifiable sources, a professional building reports and presentations, or an enterprise looking for AI that integrates with your internal knowledge, Skyworks SuperAgents is worth giving a go and trying out because it solves that core problem that's an impediment for so many people and companies, which is the depth and accuracy of the research of the models that you rely on. So go hit the link and claim your spot. And that said, let's go back to the video. So your biggest expense is not rent or a car. So on average, you pay $500,000 in taxes over the course of your lifetime. And going back to what I just said, if you're young and currently working in an entry-level job or not making a lot of money, your advantage is that you are in the lowest tax bracket right now that you'll ever be. It will only get worse. Your tax rate will only go up over time, both due to the amount of money you make and historically the fact that taxes just go up. So if you're paying the lowest amount of taxes right now, and as you make more money, you want to leverage to the max the certain benefits that the government gives you to let you pay less in taxes. You may have heard of things like Roth IRAs. We're going to cover things like that and a few other accounts so you can save legally on taxes. And to start, you may be asking, well, why do these accounts even exist in the first place? Well, the way I like to frame it is that the tax system does exist in part to fund For example, if the government wants people to stop smoking, they can just place a tax on cigarettes and people will buy fewer cigarettes. And so what does the government want people to do? And one of the goals of the government is for the economy to do well over time. And what helps the economy do better over time? Well, number one, businesses and jobs being created and money being saved and long term, the savings rate being higher, so people saving and investing more money. And so you see a tax system today that directly reflects those incentives are the things that the government wants you to do, why if you buy real estate, or you create jobs, you get a lot of tax breaks. And also why finally, these tax advantage accounts exist to help you invest more money over time, because that's better for you. And it's better for everyone. So the first big kind of account, and there's kind of two here are Roth 401ks or IRAs, and traditional 401ks or IRAs. And with these traditional accounts, you paid zero in tax today, and you just pay taxes when you pull the money out in, say, 40 years, while with a Roth account, you pay taxes today, but then the capital gains or the amount of money your investments make are completely untaxed. And the catch here is you have to leave money in accounts for long periods of time, again, going back to the incentive structure. And to use like a seed analogy here, the traditional account structure is not having to pay taxes on the seeds, but then you have to pay taxes on the whole harvest, while the Roth is you pay taxes on the seed, and you pay zero tax on the whole harvest decades later. And so logically, what do you want to pay taxes on? And so the younger you are, the more in your favor a Roth structure is going to be, because capital gains will be big if you invest for decades, right, the amount your stocks go up, and so on, it's going to be really, really massive. So not to pay any taxes on that is extremely valuable. Now the government caps the amount of money you can put in a Roth. So I suggest you go watch another video or just do some googling and find out exactly how much you can contribute. And then just max that out every year. It's not an enormous amount of money, like seven, eight, $9,000. But if you max that out every year for 40 years, that is many, many millions of dollars in completely tax free gains. Okay, now number two is the health savings account or the HSA, which is like a secret retirement stealth vehicle. And why is that? Well, health becomes people's biggest expense over time, especially toward the last, you know, 40 years of their life. And HSAs can be used for a lot more than just doctors visits, they cover a whole range of healthcare related expenses. And they're the only accounts in America with a triple tax advantage. And so the money goes into it tax free, it grows, you don't pay any taxes. And when you take it out, as long as it's used for a healthcare related expense, you pay zero in taxes. And so the strategy here is to pay cash for your doctor's visits today. So don't talk to your HSA for a long time, and then just let it grow for 10 2040 plus years. And here's the cherry on top after age 65 HSAs turn into normal IRA accounts, which means you can use them for anything, not just health related expenses, there is literally no downside there. And again, that is the only triple tax advantage that counts. So those are the big two that I wanted to touch on here. And then strategy wise, we need to think about the order of operations here. So which accounts do you fill up first, because again, there are pretty strict and low limits on how much you can put into these accounts. So first, you probably get a employer max in your 401k. So if you put in $2,000, your employer matches it with $2,000. That's free money. So whatever that limit is, just make sure first before anything else to match that amount and put it in that Roth 401k. So once you've done that, the number two is to max out the HSA account, I think it's about $4,300 as of 2025. Third, you want to go to the Roth IRA and max that out, that's usually about $7,000 a year. And then for any money left that you want to put into long term savings, head back to the Roth 401k and fill that up some more. If you max those things out in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, you wake up in your 60s with millions of dollars expected based on historical returns that the IRS has nothing to do with. That's a pretty big expected value completely tax free, and I'll see you in the next one. Cheers.