The retirement account with your name on it, not his

You can put $7,000 into a retirement account in your own name for the 2025 tax year without having earned a dollar of it. Make that $8,000 if you turned 50 by the end of the year. The cash comes out of your husband's paycheck, the account carries your Social Security number, and the IRS has permitted this arrangement for decades.

It's called a spousal IRA, which is a slightly misleading name. There's no special product to go shopping for. You won't find a button at Fidelity that says "spousal." It's a regular IRA, opened by you, in your name, funded with household income that happens to have been earned by the other adult in your marriage. The word "spousal" just describes the exception in the tax code that makes it legal.

And that exception matters, because the default rule is that you need earned income to fund an IRA. Raising four kids is work. It's not, to the IRS, compensation.

The four rules that actually govern it

You have to file jointly. Married filing separately kills the spousal IRA. No exceptions, no workaround.

Your husband's earned income has to cover both contributions. If he made $40,000, you're fine. If he made $9,000 from a side business and nothing else, you can't both max out. The combined contributions can't exceed his taxable compensation.

The account is yours. Your name, your Social Security number, your beneficiary designation. It isn't a joint account, and IRAs can't be held jointly by anybody. If the marriage ends, it's a marital asset subject to division like anything else, but the title is yours and the paperwork is in your hands.

The deadline is tax day, not December 31. You have until April 15, 2026 to fund a 2025 IRA. That's generous, and it's also how people lose a year. You tell yourself you'll do it with the refund, the refund shows up, the water heater dies.

Limits get adjusted for inflation, so check the current year's number before you write the check rather than trusting a figure you read somewhere.

Traditional or Roth, and how to pick without overthinking it

The traditional IRA gives you a deduction now and taxes you when you withdraw in retirement. The Roth gives you no deduction now and nothing to pay later, including on decades of growth.

For a lot of single-income families, the Roth is the easy call. You're likely in a lower bracket right now than you'll be in later, and a deduction is worth less when your taxable income is already modest. Paying the tax at today's rate to never pay it again is a good trade when today's rate is low.

Two income limits to know. Roth contributions for joint filers phase out between $236,000 and $246,000 of modified adjusted gross income for 2025. And if you want to deduct a traditional IRA contribution while your husband is covered by a 401(k) at work, your deduction phases out in that same $236,000 to $246,000 band. His own deduction phases out much earlier, between $126,000 and $146,000.

Below those numbers, you have a free choice. Above them, a CPA earns their fee in about twenty minutes.

Where to open it, in one afternoon

Fidelity, Schwab and Vanguard all open Roth IRAs online with no minimum and no annual fee. You'll need your Social Security number, your driver's license, and your bank's routing and account numbers. Budget half an hour, including the part where the site logs you out.

Then buy something. This is the part where the plan dies.

An enormous number of IRAs sit in cash for years because the owner funded the account, felt accomplished, and never placed a trade. The money technically arrived. It's sitting in a settlement fund earning whatever the money market pays, which isn't what you opened the thing for. Cash in an IRA is a savings account with extra paperwork.

A target date index fund solves this in one purchase. Pick the year closest to when you turn 65, buy it with the whole balance, and it handles the mix of stocks and bonds and adjusts as you age. A total market index fund is the other simple answer if you'd rather set the allocation yourself later. Either one beats a cash balance and a good intention.

Log in a week after you place the order and confirm it filled. Not every order does.

Automate it, because willpower is a terrible funding mechanism

Seven thousand dollars is $583 a month. If that's not happening this year, set it at $200 and raise it in January. A partial IRA isn't a failure. An empty one is.

Set the transfer to pull two days after his paycheck lands. Money that leaves the checking account before you see it doesn't have to compete with the kids' shoes.

Here's the piece of arithmetic worth sitting with: fifteen years of maxing a spousal IRA puts $105,000 of your own contributions into an account in your name, before a single dollar of market growth. That's not a projection or a promise about returns. That's just addition. What it grows into depends on markets nobody can forecast, which is exactly why you start early rather than waiting until the youngest is in school.

The part nobody tells you about widowhood

Social Security will pay you a spousal benefit of up to 50 percent of your husband's full retirement amount, and if he dies first, a survivor benefit of up to 100 percent of what he was receiving. That's real money and it's built into the system on purpose. It also stops being two checks and becomes one. Household income drops. The bills mostly don't.

An IRA with your name on it's the difference between having assets and having access to his.

Which brings up the least fun errand on this list. Fill out the beneficiary designation on the account, and get him to fill out his. Beneficiary forms override wills. A 401(k) still naming an ex-fiancée from 2009 goes to the ex-fiancée, and the family lawyer will tell you the estate rarely wins that fight. Check them both, today, and again after every birth and every job change.

What this is really doing

A household with one income shouldn't be a household with one retirement. You're not opening this account because you distrust your husband. You're opening it because a woman who ran a home for twenty years should own something at the end of it besides a claim on somebody else's statement.

This is general education, not advice about your situation. A CPA can tell you in one conversation whether the Roth or the traditional wins in your specific bracket, and a fee-only advisor can look at the whole picture without earning a commission on what they recommend.

Now go open it. The water heater will die either way.