13Mar 2016 by The Roamer 6 Comments
No employer match, Who cares?

No employer match, Who cares?

401K, Maximizing money, Saving
I was just working on our Net Worth post and I was looking at this graph. [caption id="attachment_1653" align="alignnone" width="313"] Traveling Wallet's asset allocation[/caption] and it just made me feel like man what a mistake! Your assets graph made you feel like what a mistake? Really?!?!? Yeah it did, and it's that little orange section right there. (more…)
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10Mar 2016 by The Roamer 4 Comments
401k Rollover, The Fear

401k Rollover, The Fear

401K, Finance
I stared at the stack of 18 papers in front of me. What am I going to do? Maybe 18 pages doesn't sound that scary, but think about it this way. If you had to read an 18 page medical journal. Then present on it to prove that you understood it, well I'm sure you're probably feeling overwhelmed right now too. That's what it's like, after all, for most people. Ask them to read a 401K rollover document from their 401K provider and you might as well tell them to go rent a physics book from the library. Not only do they have no interest in reading on the topic. It's also seen as so high level that you're intimidated before you even start. It's a recipe for ....well, for…
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04Sep 2015 by The Roamer 6 Comments
Goals: 2nd Trimester Review 2015

Goals: 2nd Trimester Review 2015

401K, Family, Finance, Saving, Yearly Review Series
At some point  this trimester I realized I needed to focus my efforts. It's not that it's impossible to work on multiple things at once. It was more the fact that I needed to do a lot of learning. See sometimes you have all the foundational knowledge to accomplish something you just need to take up the challenge to push yourself farther, harder. But that wasn't the case for a lot of what I was trying to do. I didn't have the background. So one task would split into several other smaller things that I needed to learn first. In essence my one goal might actually require me to jump 5 hurdles before even being able to address my goal. I knew that on some level. That was part of…
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28Jan 2015 by The Roamer 14 Comments
2014 Financial Goals Reviewed and Net Worth Revealed

2014 Financial Goals Reviewed and Net Worth Revealed

401K, Finance, Saving, Yearly Review Series
Time to review our Financials. We were on track to reach our 3 financial goals. Pay off all Student loans by July Open MMA Celebrate with a splurge activity for the family As you can tell these are some measly goals. Is one of them really open up a new account ,in other word break up with my bank and take my funds earning less then .01% to a better place(Hey breaking up is hard, right?). So at the start of 2014 we had over 35K of Debt. Some of that was student loan debt. Student debt Mr. Had finished paying off his the year before and so we had a talk to discuss what we would do with the newly available funds. We deferred them to my student loans.…
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08Dec 2014 by The Roamer 4 Comments
401K I like you more then Presents

401K I like you more then Presents

401K, Counter Culture, Finance
A bit a ago I wrote this article about the 401k and how we would use it. I think it wasn't super clear so let me paraphrase. I talked about how I had an ah ha moment, that I didn't have to wait until next year to max out my 401k, that I could do it now.  For this year! Well at the end I said I would make the changes which I made. Well Mr. Roamer then asked, I thought we were already maxing them out. No sorry honey, like I mentioned in the previous post I had done the math for 12 months of contributions. Or I guess a rolling 12 months. But that's not how taxes work so if we want to max it out for this…
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20Aug 2014 by The Roamer No Comments
Why Didn’t I think of that?

Why Didn’t I think of that?

401K, Finance
Today I had an Ah-HA moment. Honestly, it was a face palm moment and I really did think. Why in the world did I not think of that. Lately I have been learning a lot about finances. I've been getting nice and friendly with the idea of investing, and dipping my toes into optimization. So understanding the purpose and usage of a 401K has been one of them. So we finally committed to maxing out our 401K's every year. To do that we did the math and figured out what percentage of our paychecks we had to contribute to get there. The Problem When we started doing this calculation we were assuming a year of contributions. Which means how do we need to spread this out in a 12 month…
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