Key takeaways
- Mid-career comes with competing financial priorities, but you don’t have to figure out the order alone.
- Households with $100k or more at Betterment unlock free access to live chat with a licensed financial specialist. Not AI, not a bot—a real person.
- Higher earners often leave money behind by staying in “default mode.” Use live chat to size up advanced strategies like asset location, backdoor Roth IRAs, and tax-loss harvesting.
- Transferring investments from outside Betterment can be a simple way to reach $100k and unlock live chat, while also bringing more of your financial life under one roof.
If life is one long series of challenges, those in their 30s or 40s are somewhere in the messy middle of it all. Maybe you just bought a house, or you’re trying to. Maybe there’s a kid on the way, an expensive wedding behind you, and a college fund somewhere on the horizon. Your income is real now, your finances are getting complicated fast, and the old advice (“just max out your IRA”) stopped covering it a while ago.
The good news? You don’t have to untangle everything by yourself. Households with $100k or more at Betterment now have free access to live chat with a licensed financial specialist—someone who can look at your specific situation and help you figure out what to do next.
So let’s set the table for your first conversation.
Too many goals, not enough dollars?
You’ve got a lot going on, so much that your cash flow can’t cover everything. Free live chat can help you quickly prioritize and start knocking out money goals. Because the sooner you start, the sooner you can start enjoying the financial freedom that comes with stacking milestones. Here’s a sampling of the life goals we can help you sort through:
Buying a home. Whether you’re ready to make an offer or still saving for a down payment, a home purchase reshapes your whole financial picture. A $100k Betterment balance not only lets you size up your strategy with the help of a specialist, it can score you a discounted rate on a mortgage.
Building (or rebuilding) an emergency fund. Life has a way of getting expensive at the worst moments. Three to six months of accessible cash is the foundation everything else sits on. At the same time, it’s also possible to overdo it. So size up exactly how much cash you need to sleep better at night, and what to do with the rest.
Saving for your kid’s college. This one isn’t a pass-fail proposition. Saving even a little, especially while your kids are little, can lighten their financial load when college or trade school come knocking. The question is where to save, and how this goal fits against everything else you’re juggling.
Charitable giving. The great thing about building the foundation for long-term wealth is it empowers you to give with an abundance mindset. And by donating and replacing appreciated shares instead of dollars, you can effectively reset the tax bill on a slice of your taxable investing as an added bonus.
Get help moving $20k or more.
Move beyond the basics of investing
Once your finances mature a little, you hit a different category of question. Not “Am I saving?” but “Am I set up the right way?”
This is where a lot of investors quietly wonder if they’re missing something. And often, they are—not because they’ve done anything wrong, but because default settings don’t always age well.
A few advanced settings worth exploring include:
Asset location (aka Tax Coordination). It’s not just what you invest in, it’s where you hold it. You may now have a mix of account types (tax-deferred, tax-exempt, and/or taxable), and strategically dividing up your portfolio between them can meaningfully reduce the potential tax drag on your returns over time.
Backdoor Roth contributions. Make more money, and the tax benefits of a traditional IRA will quickly phase out. Make a little more, and the same goes for Roth IRAs. But there’s a perfectly legit workaround that high earners use to get money into a Roth anyway. It takes a couple of steps, so live chatting with our team (and a tax advisor) is highly recommended.
Tax-loss harvesting. When your taxable investments dip below their initial purchase price, you can jump on the opportunity to “harvest” the theoretical loss and potentially snag similar benefits as tax-deferred accounts.
None of these are hacks. They’re just what a well-kept portfolio and automated investing can look like once you’ve moved past the basics.
Help has entered the chat
If your household has more than $100k at Betterment, you’ve reached the point where some money questions are worth asking out loud—and you can do exactly that, for free, with a licensed financial specialist via live chat.
Not a chatbot. Not an FAQ page. A real human who can act as a sounding board, take a look at how you’re set up, and tell you honestly whether anything deserves a second look.
Think of it as a gut-check from someone who’s seen a lot of portfolios. The kind of conversation where you can ask:
- Is a backdoor Roth right for me?
- How can I grow my charitable giving right along with my wealth?
- Does my particular mix of assets and accounts make sense?
If you’re already at $100k, you’re already in—simply open a new support chat and select “Talk to a financial specialist.”
And if you’re not quite there, transferring existing investments from external accounts can be a straightforward way to get there. It can mean bringing more of your financial life under one roof, with the fuller picture in view.
So consider transferring your investments to Betterment, and get a second set of eyes for your nest egg.