Many people's companies don't offer 401ks. The limit for IRAs is lower than that for 401ks. It is very common to open a brokerage account if you had more than

Many people's companies don't offer 401ks. The limit for IRAs is lower than that for 401ks. It is very common to open a brokerage account if you had more than 5500 you wanted to put away. (Ex: grad student who interns in the summer, contractor with boom and bust pay cycle, or any worker in a company that doesn't offer a 401k) >You should be able to skip the foreign tax credit if you manually enter the 1099-DIV: simply enter foreign taxes paid field on the 1099-DIV as 0, and your tax software won't offer to credit it. I'm not sure it's legal to lie about the contents of the 1099-DIV, even if the lie is to the government's benefit :)