u/VirtualLecture9564

This is my (26M) highest earning year so far - on track to make around 70k-80k depending on how my business goes.

I maxed out my 2025 ROTH IRA contributions a month ago (just dumped 7k in SPMO) and have 4k in my 2026 contributions. I got lucky with timing because I got in when everything was low for a second. I should be able to max it in the next 2 months.

I’ve heard of the 401k, but I’m not too sure how it works or how important it is - I just know that you get taxed when you withdraw later so that’s why I went ROTH.

Currently making around 7k/m

Rent is only 750/m

Other expenses is another 750/m

I might be buying a house later this year with my family’s help (we don’t own property in the US yet, so it’s been a family goal) which will most likely increase my rent to 1500/m but they’ll take care of the down payment and the rest of the rent.

Should I try to dump the rest of my excess income in a 401k or is there something else to throw it into? I’m young so I’m fine with risk (within reason lol) - not much responsibilities rn.

I considered other things like buying gold or something but yeah that might be silly.

TLDR:

Should I invest in 401k with my excess income? Or something else?

This is my (26M) highest earning year so far - on track to make around 70k-80k depending on how my business goes.

I maxed out my 2025 ROTH IRA contributions a month ago (just dumped 7k in SPMO) and have 4k in my 2026 contributions. I got lucky with timing because I got in when everything was low for a second. I should be able to max it in the next 2 months.

I’ve heard of the 401k, but I’m not too sure how it works or how important it is - I just know that you get taxed when you withdraw later so that’s why I went ROTH.

Currently making around 7k/m

Rent is only 750/m

Other expenses is another 750/m

I might be buying a house later this year with my family’s help (we don’t own property in the US yet, so it’s been a family goal) which will most likely increase my rent to 1500/m but they’ll take care of the down payment and the rest of the rent.

Should I try to dump the rest of my excess income in a 401k or is there something else to throw it into? I’m young so I’m fine with risk (within reason lol) - not much responsibilities rn.

I considered other things like buying gold or something but yeah that might be silly.

TLDR:

Should I invest in 401k with my excess income? Or something else?

So we built an outbound voice agent for a client that essentially needed to send out welcome calls to all their new clients. It was part of their onboarding process.

Lots of ups and downs, but here’s a list of lessons learned:

1. You have to explain to the client that an AI voice agent works best when it’s slightly flexible - not following the script EXACTLY.

Sometimes the client wants a human sounding call tree - not really an AI voice agent. And building that is really really hard because AI by nature is meant to handle things in a fluid way, not like a call tree. We didn’t communicate this with the client, and it caused a bunch of headaches since the client was frustrated that the AI didn’t stick to the script word for word.

2. The actual AI isn’t the hardest part.

We had to build so much other functions, tool calls, and automations on top of the agent for it to be truly useful for the client. These are things like: daily reports to a custom dashboard, live notifications for anything (positive or negative), building a followup system for when a client doesn’t pick up, building a custom followup system for when a client wants to be called at a specific time… and more.

That was a headache, but it was worth it.

3. People are fine talking to AI if it’s actually useful.

This is a big one. I think a lot of business owners are scared of AI because they think their clients would get frustrated and give the business a bad rep, but in these 1500 calls that we had, the client only got frustrated when the AI was malfunctioning.

This means that when the AI actually worked, even when the clients recognized it was AI, they were totally fine going through with the call because it was actually useful.

So if you’re struggling to convince leads or even just second guessing yourself, the world IS ready for AI. You just have to build it well.

Hopefully these lessons can help somebody out there because I wish I knew some of these when I first started to build these things. If you guys need help with building your AI agents, feel free to shoot over any questions and I’ll do my best to help out in the comments.