IRA plans only allow up to $6,000 in yearly contributions ($7000 if you’re 50 or older). With such a low limit, one may wonder:
Can I open a different IRA and invest $6000 in each?
Also, IRAs allow for more investment types than 401Ks. That means that if you put a high-risk investment worth ~$6000, next year, it may be worth twice as much (or half as much). You can also play it safe and do Treasury Bonds instead.
Maybe you want a different retirement account but don’t want to depend on a 401K. Can you open IRAs of different types?
How Many IRAs Can You Have?
Traditional IRAs work just as traditional 401Ks. The difference is an individual account, and the other is an employer account. You fund your retirement with pre-tax dollars and pay when you withdraw at 59 1/2.
Roth IRAs do the opposite. You fund your retirement account with taxed dollars, so you don’t need to pay them later. Because of compound interest, you end up with more money than you put.
Now, all individual accounts have a $6,000 limit.
You can open as many as you want, even multiple of the same IRA type. But you can’t invest more than that amount in total per year.
How can you expect to retire with millions when you need to split a couple thousand of dollars a year?
You could open 100s of IRAs, but that wouldn’t be better than having one or two.
There’s a way, however, to invest over $6,000 per year in your IRAs.
The 401K-IRA rollover
Traditional 401Ks have 2x-3x higher limits than IRAs if you don’t count for the employer match. You can then move to your IRA account whatever you earned in your 401K.
This way, you can move over $6000 per year (almost $20,000). But don’t think this will help you avoid taxes on retirement.
401K tax when you withdraw money and rollovers count as such. So if you move that to your Roth IRA, you first need to pay taxes on that money. But after that, it grows tax-free.