You must be really old to be arguing about A. L. Williams insurance marketing from back in the 70s. Certainly too old to know what someone’s tag line about “Level Up” means. But the adage about how “life insurance isn’t bought, it’s sold” certainly applies to Roth IRA’s. A. L. Williams was the Mary Kay of financial products, and its part-time agents had the same sophistication as those touting Roths these days.

The point, of course, is made succinctly here:

“The longer the time period held, the better a Roth is over an IRA contribution. This myth is repeated too often. The premise is the longer a Roth grows tax free, the better it is than an IRA which is taxable upon contribution. It doesn’t matter if you hold 1, 10, or 30 years; if the tax rate at contribution is the same as your tax rate when you take distributions, it will work out to be the same ending value.”

https://www.virtuswealth.com/myths-of-income-taxes/

The discussion these days could be whether to “invest the rest,” or to put that $30,000 paid for the privilege of a $100,000 Roth, when the investor could instead use the funds to pay down a mortgage. For millions of homeowners, there is no tax advantage to mortgage interest. They claim the standard deduction anyway. And if they have kids headed to college, that Roth will scotch scholarship dollars faster than home equity.

I did figure out, though, why tax-depleted Roths are pushed by the “financial planners” who work off a percentage of the value of the accounts they manage. They’re stupid. If they knew how to manage money, they wouldn’t be trying to do it for other people, they would have enough of their own. Roths are a niche, not a panacea. But they have become part of the same game as the Annuity Scam, or the LLC Scam, or the Living Trust Scam. People do them, because everyone else is doing them.