Are you maxing out two IRAs and your 401k? If not, do that first. Then worry anout a taxable account after.
Oh, goodness. No. We don't make nearly enough to come even close to maxing them out at the current levels of $5500/year each. But you do bring up a valid point. I could just transfer that extra $50-100 a month to our Roths and work on that. I think my line of thinking was that I wanted to have it in a taxable account to grow because I wanted to be able to take it out at my own leisure (once it's grown, not anytime soon) without being restricted by the gains having to stay in the roth. But logic dictates that if we can't afford to pay the taxes on gains in a taxable account, we can't afford to invest in the taxable account in the first place. (Yet.)
I do contribute 15% to my 401k, but have been considering lowering that percentage because I don't get a company match at all. When I joined, I decided even without the match, it's a good deal to reduce tax liability, etc. Being unemployed, My Husband doesn't have a 401k, but we do both have (some) money in previous employers' 401k that we need to figure out how to roll into our current IRA accounts so we can actually keep track of them.
Call vanguard, they will guide you through rolling over your previous 401ks into your tIRA. It's easy, you will just have to find out who holds the previous 401k accounts, and probably sign some paperwork to enable vanguard to do their thing and roll it over.
If you don't get a match on your 401k you are almost certainly better off putting that money into a traditional IRA. Your fees and expense ratios will be lower in an IRA (especially if you use vanguard and low cost index funds).
If I were you I would open an IRA at vanguard (for you and your spouse) and contribute the first $11k you can invest for retirement in those accounts. After that you can put money into your 401k.
Money you put into a roth ira can be taken out at any time. You cannot take out the growth without penalty, but you can take out your initial contribution with no penalty (other than losing that investment opportunity and using your roth contribution - if you put $5.5k in today, you can take out $5.5k at any point in the future, but you obviously lose the future growth potential, and you cannot replace that money - if you take that out you don't get your contribution limit back, it's gone once you initially put your money in).
I don't know how much you make, but it might make sense to skip the tax deferred contributions in part, or in whole, depending on your income.
For example if you are married, and you make $32k/year (both you and your spouse combined) the standard deduction and exemption will bring you down to $12k "taxable income", which will all be in the 10% bracket meaning you owe $12k * 0.10 = $1.2k in taxes. Putting $2k into an IRA would reduce your income by $2k and qualify you for a tax savers credit worth $1k. This reduces your taxable income to only $10k, which means taxes would be $1k, and you have a $1k credit meaning you pay $0 federal income tax. In this scenario you should stop contributing to an IRA and put the rest of your money into a taxable account.
To further clarify about taxable accounts:
If you are in the 15% tax bracket or lower (after adding in your dividends and capital gains as income) then dividends and long term capital gains are taxed at 0%.
Capital gains are generally only realized when you sell the asset. If you invest $5k into taxable, and it shoots up to $100k within a few years, you don't need to pay capital gains taxes until you sell it. Of course if you are in the 15% tax bracket or lower you could always sell the appreciated asset (to the point that you are still in the 15% tax bracket or lower) and lock in those capital gains at 0%.