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Its human nature to wait until the last minute rather than plan aheadperhaps especially when it comes to retirement planning. Theres always plenty of other excellent uses for your money, until suddenly youre staring at an underfunded 401(k) with only a few years left before you’ll need it. This is why president George W. Bush passed legislation in 2001 that (among other things) allowed for catch-up contributions among workers who were 50 or older. This gave older workers a chance to beef up their 401(k) accounts while they were typically at the peak of their earning years and let them continue to take advantage of making pre-tax contributions. Other than increasing the amount of money 50+ workers can contribute, the basics of catch-up contributions have remained virtually the same for the past two decadesuntil now. As of calendar year 2027, the SECURE 2.0 Act eliminates the catch-up contribution tax break for 50+ workers earning $145,000 or more. Heres what you need to know about how this change may affect your retirement planning. Current contribution and catch-up limits As of 2025, workers may contribute up to $23,500 pre-tax to their 401(k) or other defined contribution workplace retirement plan. Workers over the age of 50 may put aside an additional $7,500 in catch-up contributions, for a total of $31,000, pre-tax. And any workers between the ages of 60 and 63 may make an $11,250 super catch-up contribution, for a total contribution limit of $34,750 in pre-tax dollars. The ability to make these contributions pre-tax means 50+ workers get to reduce their tax burden for the current year by over $30,000, a huge tax benefit. Same catch-up contributions, different tax breaks But after December 31, 2026, the IRS will require you to make catch-up contributions with after-tax money if you earned $145,000 or more from your current employer in the previous year. In other words, if you’re over 50 and earn more than $145k in 2026, youll have to put in any 2027 catch-up contributions as after-tax Roth contributions. This change does not affect regular contributions at all. Even if you are a high earning 50-something, every dollar of your regular contributions will be pre-tax (unless you choose otherwise). It is only the catch-up contributions that must be categorized as Roth contributions for high earning individuals. Roth aint so bad, once you get used to it Theres a very good reason why Uncle Sam made 401(k) plans tax-deferred: were much more likely to contribute money to our futures if we can get a tax break today. But the thing about this kind of upfront tax-break is that taxes will come due eventually. You will have to pay regular income taxes on 401(k) withdrawals in retirement. Roth contributions, on the other hand, are made with money that has already been taxed. While that makes things a bit more expensive today, it can be a boon for your future self because the money grows and can be withdrawn tax-free in retirement. (This is why I personally recommend having at least some money set aside in a Roth account. Investing in a Roth retirement account means you have a tax-free source of cash that wont affect your Social Security benefits or other taxable income if you need access to a big chunk of money. For example, if you have a health issue in retirement, you can pull money from your Roth account without affecting the tax-balanced fixed income youre living on.) In addition, Roth 401(k) plans dont require you to take required minimum distributions (RMDs) as of age 73, unlike traditional 401(k)s. That means you can let your money continue to grow in your Roth 401(k) past your 73rd birthday. While potentially losing the tax break on catch-up contributions is not ideal, especially if youve been counting on it, there are some real benefits to having money in a Roth account for retirement. How many workers will this really affect? There is still time before the new rules go into effect, but it does raise an interesting question: just how widespread an issue will this be? To start, only about 8.37% of individual workers earned $145,000 or more in 2024. As of 2025, there are an estimated 124.37 million Americans over the age of 50. If we assume 8.37% of 124.37 million 50+ Americans are earning $145k or more, that leaves us with 10,410,154 affected workers. However, not everyone contributes to a 401(k) plan or other defined contribution plan. According to 2025 research by Gallup, only 66% of Americans over age 50 have money invested in a 401(k) plan, 403(b) plan, or IRA, either on their own, or jointly with a spouse. If we assume that only 66% of workers earning over $145,000 are investing in a defined benefit plan, that leaves us with 6,870,701 potentially affected individuals. That said, even if youre not among the 6.8 million workers who might face this problem, you still may want to consider making Roth contributions. If your 401(k) plan doesnt offer Roth contributions as an option, you can always open a Roth IRA on your own to take advantage of the same benefits. Whether youre under the age of 50 or earning less than $145,000, or both, you can still benefit from the upsides of a Roth. Preparing for good problems The upcoming changes to catch-up contribution rules can feel like having the rug pulled out from under you, but theres still time to get ready for the shift. Its also a good idea to remember that if youre required to make Roth 401(k) catch-up contributions, its because youre otherwise in pretty great financial shape. Thats because you: Could afford to max out your 401(k) annual contribution that was more than $23,500 for the year Earned at least $145,000 in 2026 And still had money left over that you could contribute to your retirement account. Though it may affect your tax strategy now, the new rules will also give you access to a Roth account that will grow tax-free and will be available for tax-fre withdrawals without any RMDs. The change also brings the benefits of Roth 401(k) plans into the spotlight, and may encourage more plan participants to make Roth contributions, even if the new rules dont affect them. All in all, the new rules may be a pain in the neck to plan for, but theyre mostly a net benefit.
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E-Commerce
I like chatting with my friendswho doesnt?but I dont always know where to find them. There are simply too many apps. Some of my friends text, others use WhatsApp, while others yet insist on using Discord or the DM feature in whatever random social network they prefer. Its a mess, and it can mean keeping several tabs open all day just to keep the conversations flowing. It makes you wish some application could combine all of your conversations into one place. This is a dream that used to be reality. Applications like Trillian, Pidgin, and Adium all combined instant messaging services like AIM, MSN, and ICQ in one handy interface. Over time, though, messaging services got more protective of their APIs, and these sorts of all-in-one portals slowly stopped working. The dream, it seems, is dead. Or is it? This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures! Messaging, minus the mess Time to meetor maybe just rememberan exceptional app that takes all of your messages and puts them in a single streamlined interface for easy, ongoing access. The app is called Beeper. It can connect to all the major messaging platforms: Google Messages, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Google Chat, Facebook Messenger, Signal, LinkedIn, X, Discord, and Slack. Its one application for all of your conversations no matter where they might be happening. Installing Beeper is quicka minute or two, tops, but adding in all of your messaging services could take longer, depending on how many different things youre connecting. Now, if Beeper rings a bell, theres probably a reason. You may recall a controversy around Beeper a few years back involving Apple. The application was initially launched as a way for Android users to send blue bubble messages to Apple usersa feature Apple then worked diligently to shut down. (These days, Beeper can connect to iMessage only via its desktop Mac version.) In the time since then, the programs been acquired by Automattic, the same company behind WordPress and Tumblr, and given both new resources and a new reason for existing. If you have an Android phone, you can use it to manage your text messages alongside messages from other applications (something that, as an iPhone user myself, makes switching to Android a tempting option). And no matter what type of phone youre using, combining several little-used messaging apps into one that you keep openon your phone and/or computeris in and of itself worthwhile. I hardly ever open LinkedIn or Facebook, for instance, and yet I never miss any messages on either platform with Beeper in the mix. Beeper unites all your chat apps and makes them feel like a single streamlined communication system. Ive personally been using Beeper for years, and I love that it creates a single inbox for all of my ongoing conversations across any applications. Before this tool, I would constantly see a notification, intend to respond, and then never get around to it because the message came in via an application I dont check often. That doesnt happen anymore. I honestly believe Beeper makes me better at keeping in touch. I also like that you can archive messages, allowing you to create a sort of inbox zero for text messages. If I see something I intend to respond to later, I simply leave it un-archived in my inboxthe same as I do with emailsthen power through my messages whenever I have a minute. There are a bunch of other nice features beyond that. On the desktop computer front, Beepers keyboard shortcutsincluding a built-in command barmean I can jump between conversations without ever touching my mouse. I could go on, but you get the idea. Beeper is just a well-put-together piece of software that solves a common problem. It takes a little bit of fidgeting to get going at first, but the results are 100% worth it. Beeper runs on Android, iPhone, iPad, ChromeOS, macOS, Windows, and Linuxso basically, everything. The service offers a free version that supports up to five accounts on different messaging services, which is probably plenty for most people. If you need to connect to more than that, youll have to spring for a paid subscription, starting at $10 a month (or $100 a year). Many of Beepers integrations run in the cloud, meaning an encrypted copy of your messages does get stored by the company. The privacy policy is pretty solid, though, and there are no ads or data monetization built into the application. Its funded entirely by subscribers. Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
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E-Commerce
I was thrilled this week when Apple issued a press release announcing that its original film, F1 The Movie, starring Brad Pitt, would make its streaming debut on the companys video service December 12. But it wasnt the news about the movie that excited me. Rather, it was a small line at the end of the press release that quietly announced something else: Apple TV+ is now simply Apple TV, with a vibrant new identity. The + branding on Apple TV+ always bugged me. Whenever I looked at it, I thought, Apple TV plus what? Apple News offers a free base version and a paid version that gets you more content, called Apple News+, which makes sense. But theres never been a free version of Apples video streaming service, so what was the + signifying? The + branding had also grown increasingly tiresome over the years, as nearly every streaming service added the mathematical operator onto its name. Mercifully, Apple has now decided to subtract the plus. Heres the why, and how the company could go further toward to ending brandings most tiresome scourge. The company didnt invent the +, but it embraced it like no other Until this week, Apple had been leaning hard into the + branding for yearsnearly as hard as it did to the much more iconic i branding in the early 2000s. Apple debuted its first + branding all the way back in October 2011 with its AppleCare+ extended warranty program, which covered accidental damage to a users iPhone. It used an alphabetic version of the nomenclature with the iPhone 6 Plus model in 2014. But it wasnt until 2019 that Apple began to go hog wild on +. That year, Apple debuted the Apple News+ news subscription service and the Apple TV+ video streaming service. A year later, in 2020, Apple debuted the Apple Fitness+ workout streaming service, and a year after that, the company added its latest + service, iCloud+. Yet Apple wasnt the first tech or media company to tack + onto a product. The earliest I can remember is NBC Universals and News Corps Hulu Plus back in 2010, and then, several months before Apple debuted AppleCare+ in 2011, Google came out with its now-defunct social network Google+. The next major company to embrace the “+” was Disney, with ESPN+ in 2018. However, the + really went viral in the final months of 2019. In September of that year, BET launched BET+. Two months later, Apple TV+ and the streaming giant Disney+ arrived. In the years that followed, we got more: Discovery+, Paramount+, AMC+, the short-lived CNN+, and more. But it was Apple, with its no fewer than five + products, that was the clear cross-bearersorry, plus-bearerfor the techno-media industries. Apple explains why it killed off the Apple TV + Apples announcement to drop the + from Apple TV+ this week came out of the blue. However, shortly after the abrupt name change, the company explained its reasoning. In an appearance on The Town podcast (via 9to5Mac), Apples senior vice president of Services, Eddy Cue, who oversees products including Apple Music, Apple News, and the newly named Apple TV, spoke about the subtraction of the +. Cue revealed that the company originally named its streaming service “Apple TV+” simply because Apple had used the “+” mark in its other subscription services, such as Apple News+ and iCloud+. “But we do that when we have a free service and then theres a paid version,” Cue acknowledged, noting the distinction between Apple TV and the company’s other paid services. “We stayed consistent because of it,” Cue continued, admitting, “but we all called it Apple TV, and we said, given where we are today [with the service’s brand awareness], its a great time to [ditch the “+”], so lets just do it. Apple shows no signs of entirely abandoning the + My colleague, Grace Snelling, spoke to several branding experts the wake of the Apple TV service rebrand. They all seem to agree that Apple made the right move in dropping the +. As Snelling noted, in the early days of the streaming wars that began in 2019, the “+” addendum attached to a name served as an easy identifier, indicating that the product being sold was a streaming service. However, now that the symbol has become ubiquitous, it has lost some of its branding power. As Cue pointed out, the Apple TV streaming service brand is now strong enough that the “+” is no longer needed. Yet while Apple has now subtracted the + from Apple TV, the company remains firmly on the + side of the equation. Four of its products still carry the mathematical moniker: Apple News+, iCloud+, Apple Fitness+, and AppleCare+. Here, the + makes more sense than it ever did on Apple TV, since it signifies additional features. Cue’s comments suggest that Apple has no intention of eliminating the “+” from the rest of this product lineup. Still, it’s worth noting that the removal of “+” from Apple TV’s name isnt the first time in 2025 that Apple has eliminated the symbol from one of its products. In September, Apple replaced the iPhone Plus model in its smartphone lineup with the new iPhone Air.
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E-Commerce
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