I have a retirement account from my old place of work that I can not contribute towards because my new place of work doesn’t have a 401k or anything of the sort. I have been looking up what I can do with it and came to the conclusion I can roll it into a traditional Ira. I couldn’t for the life of me find how to contribute towards it with pre tax dollars once’s it was transferred. I tried to contact some advisers but they all want to not help and just try to take 1% of my retirement which I’m not gonna do. If anyone could help me or correct me if I’m wrong it would be a huge help.
I need help my my old 401k
byu/Altruistic-Gain8506 inpersonalfinance
Posted by Altruistic-Gain8506
5 Comments
> I couldn’t for the life of me find how to contribute towards it with pre tax dollars once’s it was transferred
You contribute to it with after tax dollars, then deduct contributions from your taxes when you fill out your tax return the following year.
Make sure you’re under the income limit for traditional IRA deductions.
Normally once you have left a company you can not longer contribute to an old 401k. If you roll it over to an IRA you can contribute to your IRA
You have two options – leave it where it is or roll it over into an IRA. The main potential downside of having it in an IRA is that it might prevent you from doing a backdoor IRA, but that would only be a concern if your income was too high to directly contribute to a Roth IRA.
You can’t contribute to a Trad IRA with pre-tax dollars. You contribute with post-tax dollars, and then you *may* qualify for a deduction when you file.
If you don’t [qualify for a Trad IRA deduction](https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/smart-money/ira-contribution-limits#:~:text=Traditional%20IRA%20deduction%20limits%20for%202026), then you should contribute to a Roth IRA.
If you don’t [qualify for a Roth IRA](https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/smart-money/roth-ira-income-limits#:~:text=qualify.-,Roth%20IRA%20income%20limits%20for%202026,-The), you should do Backdoor Roth. And then you should roll the Trad IRA back to your 401k if you can, otherwise you’ll run into Backdoor Roth’s [pro rata rule](https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/fix-backdoor-roth-ira-screw-ups/#:~:text=Step%20#5%20Error:%20The%20Pro%2DRata%20Rule).
If you roll over the 401(k) to a traditional IRA, you can then contribute up to the contribution limit out of pocket. You then take a deduction for the amount of the contributions, which reduces your tax liability, effectively making the contribution pre-tax.
However, you may not want to contribute to that IRA. Why? In the future you may have a job that does offer a 401(k), which opens the possibility that you could “reverse rollover” the IRA into the new 401(k). But some employer plans do not allow rollovers of IRA funds that are co-mingled rollover funds and contributions.
If you want to be making IRA contributions, open a separate IRA for the purpose (you can have multiple IRAs).