[jba]

it is definitely EV+ to use an IRA for retirement savings. if your tax rate is 33% you can invest 30k into IRA as opposed to 20k into regular inv vehicle, and the compound interest on that extra 10k is awesome. your earnings from dividends will also be much higher as it is not taxable, and you will earn compound interest on that. there are many IRA calculators that will run sims on this sort of stuff for you and you're going to be shocked at the results.

max them out.

depending on how much you make this year vs how much you expect to be making at retirement it might make more sense to open a roth IRA