Money Monday: Retirement and Savings Edition

[Bluedaisy]

Good morning!

How do you feel you're doing on savings?  Do you have a retirement plan or just plan to work forever?  Has LO changed your savings priorities?

1. What's your retirement plan and are you happy with where you are with it?

2. Are you saving for anything else big in the future? (Trips, houses, etc).

3. Any big financial goals for 2016?

[Bluedaisy]

1. DH and both have pretty good pensions are our jobs. We're also putting into retirement savings. I feel like we're a little behind where I'd like to be because we used our retirement savings for our down payment on the house so now we have to pay that back. But I think in the long run it will really help us out because our house will be paid off that much faster.

2. Right now since my salary is so low we don't have anything on the horizon other than trying to make it until my mat leave is over and to pay down debt. We're still putting into retirement and college savings for LO though.

3. Our biggest goal is to get out from under credit card debt to free up that money.

[erbear]

My response to this? LOL

Not to your topic, just to the thought of us actually being in a place where we can have savings and such again. At least we both have to pay into retirement as public school employees!

[Widget123]

1. DH and I are contributing somewhere around 15% or so to our 401Ks each year. I guess that is pretty good.

2. We aren't really saving for anything in particular now, just trying to pay off the house and 2 car loans. Eventually we are going to do some more home remodeling.

3. Not anything out of the ordinary. If anything try not to argue too much about money.

[jessila]

1. DH has an amazing 401k. I will have state pension from being a teacher. We looked into a 403b for me but DH decided against it since the school district doesn't match anything (he doesn't understand how the education system works ;-) ) We haven't done anything savings wise for O yet. I'm guessing we'll talk about that sometime this year.

2. We like to have a good chunk in savings just in case we need it for something.

3. I think we're going to focus on paying down debts. We had to take out a home equity loan to sell our townhouse last year and I have an absurd amount of student loans. He just wants to get them down.

[missjenniebean]

I made SO get an IRA and a savings account. I have a 401 k at work.

I make sure to pay ourselves first or we'll never save. He actually thanked me for both.

Our savings got hit bc my hours were cut one pay but I'm hoping to grow it back for emergencies. I have a Christmas club for Christmas so we don't have to worry. I try n put money in v's savings in case of misc expenses for her.

My goal is to actually keep money in my savings, but I will hopefully pay off a credit card!

[jillywilly]

1. What's your retirement plan and are you happy with where you are with it? We both are contributing to our 401k's, and DH has a Roth IRA on top of that. We're both contributing a decent amount, more than what we need to in order go get the maximum match from our employer's, so we're happy for now with where we're at.

2. Are you saving for anything else big in the future? (Trips, houses, etc). We try to take a trip every year, so that's just part of our budge. The last couple years we've used big chunks of money for IVF, and then having a baby and putting a deck on the house. This year we want to maybe take a break from a "big" purchase of the year, and just work on beefing up our nest egg a little more.

3. Any big financial goals for 2016? We're talking about seeing a financial planner, just to make sure we're where we should be with retirement savings, college savings for DS, etc, and see if/where it would make sense to invest some of our extra savings. We're lucky to be pretty financially comfortable, so we just want to make sure we stay that way!

[heartofglass]

1. What's your retirement plan and are you happy with where you are with it?
DH has a 401k and Roth through his employer and I have both set up personally for me. My employer doesn't offer retirement because we are part time. We aren't able to contribute as much as I would like thanks to bills, but at least we are putting away something.

2. Are you saving for anything else big in the future? (Trips, houses, etc).
I have about 5 different savings accounts set up for various projects, trips, and emergencies that I squirrel away money into. Otherwise we would just spend all our money and DH would have huge debt.

3. Any big financial goals for 2016?
We're hoping to sell our house this year and make a big profit. It was a Foreclosure that we remodeled, so we're optimistically hoping to double our money on it.

[Deleted]

Jan 25, 2016 8:25:15 GMT -5 Bluedaisy said:

Good morning!

How do you feel you're doing on savings?  Do you have a retirement plan or just plan to work forever?  Has LO changed your savings priorities?

1. What's your retirement plan and are you happy with where you are with it?

2. Are you saving for anything else big in the future? (Trips, houses, etc).

3. Any big financial goals for 2016?

H is an independent contractor so he has an IRA. He also is really good at following and managing his own stocks so he has an Etrade account. I had a 401k that after I left my job 2 months ago I converted to an IRA. The stock market has been horrible lately. I lost a lot of money this month.

Because of how volitile the stock market has been lately we decided to liquefy our largest asset which is our home and from that money we are going to downsize and buy a more affordable house.

our house before that we just sold I would describe as living above our means which I don't want to ever do again!

We are going to take the extra money we just made from selling our home and buy a small rental property in an up and coming neighborhood in Los Angeles. Rents in Los Angeles continue to rise so that seems like a better bet then sinking more money into stocks and I don't want it just sitting in savings. The only tricky part to this is that we dont live in LA anymore. But we know that area and home market so well that to us it's less of a risk then investing in a city we don't know.





Having LO hasnt really changed any of our financial goals. I've always been pretty conservative with money and don't spend a lot and neither does H