I was told it was too late to contribute to either my traditional IRA or Roth IRA to qualify for tax deductions before filing my 2019 taxes since I’m “already covered by a qualified employer-sponsored retirement for any part of 2019”.
What does this mean? I’ve never heard this before.I have both a traditional and Roth IRA account and have STRS (retirement for educators instead of social security). Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Hm… that doesn’t make sense to me either. I’ve never heard of an employer-sponsored retirement plan causing you to be ineligible to contribute to a Roth IRA (at least). It might impact your ability to make the traditional IRA deduction though?
Tax day is only six days away, but I would have to defer to a CPA or other tax professional on this one.
Edit: Actually, I think I may know what is going on. You can only take the tax break for the traditional IRA if you haven’t taken the income deduction for your employer sponsored retirement plan. Basically, people who have 401ks generally can’t double dip and also do a traditional IRA tax break. The Roth IRA part is what confused me, but I think that might be explained by the fact that there is never a tax break for a Roth IRA. After tax money is contributed to a Roth IRA. But the reason you do that is that it’s NEVER TAXED AGAIN.
So I think if you ask your CPA if you’re allowed to make a Roth IRA contribution, the answer is likely yes. (Unless you’re over the income limit, in which case you should ask her about a backdoor Roth IRA contribution)