So, I'm a recent graduate and I guess I was wondering, at this age, should I be contributing more towards a 401(k) or a Roth IRA?

I love it. Congrats on graduating, right? Here's the thing and I know when I go back to where I was when I first graduated, I was trying to ask my mom like, wait, how much do I put in this 401K? Definitely didn't even know what a Roth IRA was fresh out of college at 22. But here's the thing, I'm gonna always tell you to maximize what your company, what your corporation is willing to max. I'm sorry, what your company is willing to match you at. What do I mean by that? If you work for a company and they're giving you a 401k benefits package where they saying, hey, I'm gonna match you dollar for dollar up to a certain threshold and that threshold could be up to 5, 6, 10%. whatever that number is, you automatically max that out. Why? Because that's free money. It is free money. If you work at, I don't know, AT&T and they say, hey, for your retirement benefits package, we're gonna match you up dollar for dollar up to 6% and you make 100,000 and 6% is, you know, you could invest up to $6,000 and they give you another 6k. So that means for you to invest 6k they're gonna give you 6k. That means day one you make 100% return on your money. That means you're one of the greatest investors in the country because you have made 100% on your capital day one, meaning your money's doubled, meaning that it's free money. So that's what I love. After that, I love a Roth IRA. Reason being is because what you see is what you get. The difference between a 401k and a Roth IRA is the way taxes are treated, right? A 401k means technically you get a little, um, you get taxed on the back end. Roth IRA means your money has already been taxed and therefore you invest it. And when you get ready to graduate, when you get ready to retire, you take that money out completely tax free. So here's the idea and here's the way that I would structure it. If you have a company that's willing to match you dollar for dollar up to a certain threshold, that is what you max out at your 401k. After that your next budget assuming you, you know, not over the, the income thresholds, you're gonna want to preface, you're gonna want to prefer a Roth IRA because it's the tax treatment, right? No, and I'll say this all the time, right? If you look at what the US deficit has been over the past 10 years, it's nearly tripled. We went from like 10 trillion over 30 trillion in the past like 10 years, right? You ask yourself, what are we gonna do to get our deficit down, right? You have Elon Musk come out there and create Do, this, that and the third. But the deficit is only doing one thing, it's going higher. So at some point we got to potentially raise taxes or we're just gonna continue to inflate and print more money, right? And so you ask yourself, if we continue to raise taxes, where's what's gonna happen? And so when a person's thinking about what their tax code's gonna be when they retire, nobody's really assuming that taxes could potentially increase. I remember during the Biden administration at one point, he said, hey, maybe we should tax unrealized capital gains. Unrealized is technically in your 401k, right? Like these are things that you got to think about. And so your Roth IRA and it's a reason that the IRS says you can only invest up to $7,000 on a Roth IRA but you could do over, you know, $22,000 in a 401k because they know that in, you know, 30 years, 20 years, whenever you get ready to retire, they can't touch that money. So I always prefer a Roth IRA. The only time I prefer a 401k is when your company is willing to match you dollar for dollar.