Index funds will get you to fire, but will they get you there fast? If you're willing to take on more risk for potentially faster wealth building, there's a whole world beyond the traditional stock bond portfolio. The question is, should you go there?

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my trustworthy co-hosts. Thanks, Mindy. Great to be here. You're my financial model co-host. Thank you so much for all you do. We are so excited to be joined by John Bowens from Equity Trust on today's episode. He has been on the podcast before, and he's just such a wealth of knowledge. We're going to be talking about advanced portfolio strategies in today's episode. And before I monologue about them, I do want to welcome, John. John, thank you so much for coming back. Hey, thank you Scott and Mindy. As always for having me. Awesome. All right, now for the promised monologue here. We got to set this up because this is a really advanced discussion. If we're going

to be investing in alternative assets like private equity, private lending, venture capital,

real estate, private businesses, and other types of similar assets, inside of our retirement

accounts, we need to be aware of or have a philosophy, I believe, or strategy

for where to allocate those assets and how to hold them in the context of our entire net worth

or more broadly diversified portfolio. In the context of a broadly diversified portfolio,

generally speaking, I believe that best practices are as follows.

First, we're going to keep the most aggressive portion of our investment assets inside of a

Roth IRA or an HSA or equivalent.

Second, we're going to put the least aggressive, the most conservative portion of a portfolio

inside of the 401k or tax-deferred

plans. That means by process of elimination, we're going to have the more balanced or hybrid

assets inside of the after-tax portfolio outside of those retirement accounts. The reason for

this is that the Roth grows tax-free and can be passed to airs tax-free. We typically, in most withdrawal

strategies or order of operations, will withdraw funds and assets from the Roth IRA last for

tax maximization purposes, and therefore we can stomach or handle the largest possible amount

of long-term growth and largest

amount of volatility inside of that Roth IRA.

The pre-tax accounts like the 401 are often going to be withdrawn first or second in most

retirement planning scenarios.

These accounts are likely going to be taxed at some point, either in our lifetime or when

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