I was just working on our Net Worth post and I was looking at this graph. 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…)
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
