ROTH IRAs – All you need to know

Roth IRAs are special individual retirement accounts that offer valuable tax benefits, including tax-free growth on your investments.

How does a Roth IRA work?

A Roth IRA is a retirement account that encourages you to save by offering you a tax benefit. Unlike with a traditional IRA, your contributions to a Roth IRA are not tax-deductible. But those contributions and your investment earnings grow tax-free, meaning there’s no tax on your Roth IRA withdrawals in retirement. With a traditional IRA, your withdrawals in retirement are taxed as income.

Like a traditional IRA, a Roth IRA is an account that holds your investments, rather than an investment itself. You open a Roth IRA at a brokerage or bank, then select what you want to invest in, such as mutual funds, stocks, bonds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) or bank savings products. (For a long-term goal like retirement, we recommend investing in stocks and bonds because of their higher returns. That means opening your Roth at a brokerage or robo-advisor rather than at a bank.)

A Roth IRA is an individual retirement account that offers tax-free growth and tax-free withdrawals in retirement. Roth IRA rules dictate that as long as you’ve owned your account for 5 years and you’re age 59½ or older, you can withdraw your money when you want to and you won’t owe any federal taxes.