“Have you ever met someone in their 70ies now who have remotely complained about contributing too much on a retirement account and are now getting taxed up the ars now? Just curious.”
flu, no, I haven’t met anyone in the situation you describe. (I’m in no way claiming that they don’t exist. I just don’t know any.) If a person has accumulated money in a tax-deferred retirement accounts for 20 years, then I would think they’d have done very well compared to someone who had paid taxes every year on bonds or many mutual funds (with high turnover and/or high income).
Perhaps your parents’ friends would have done much better to pay taxes on their source income and invest in funds that were taxed annually. But I wonder if their current opinions are biased by the immediate negative of current taxes on past gains, and they are losing sight of the large tax benefits they reaped years ago.
This reminds me of homeowners who bought in 1987 or 1996, whose homes went up by $1 million, and who complain sincerely about the financial burden of their home, because the prices have gone down by $100,000 in the last year. All they see is the $100,000 loss, forgetting the prior $1 million gain and the huge net benefit.
