Today our retirement accounts total balance (401k, Roth IRA, & Traditional IRA) passed $100,000.
Our retirement accounts total balance is $100,697.64! This is a major blessing and milestone for us. I’ve always heard the first $100K is the hardest and that it just gets easier. Let’s hope that’s the case.
We are currently in escrow on a beautiful 5 bed/3 bath home that should fit our needs for many, many years to come. To keep our monthly mortgage payment low and to avoid PMI, we have elected to raid our retirement accounts for some of the down payment. I know, I know, hear me out..
The 2 bedroom condo that we are renting is $1,550/month and, with our growing family, it is a tight squeeze. After finding our dream home, we quickly realized that the ~$47,000 in our savings was not enough for a 20% down payment. The home was $489,000, so 20% down is $97,800, meaning that we needed to come up with another $51,000.
We poached $51,000 from our almost $100,000 in retirement savings. $30,000 came from Roth IRA contributions and $21,000 was borrowed from my 401(k). You can withdraw Roth IRA contributions at any time without penalty or taxes. The 401(k) loan has a 5 year payment schedule at $179.44/check. If I were to leave my company for any reason before the loan is paid back, the balance would be due, or I would have to pay a 10% penalty and income tax on the money.
If the deal goes through, our interest rate will be 3.75%, resulting in a monthly mortgage payment of $1,811 on a mortgage of $391,200. Add $600/month for tax and insurance and we are up to $2,411/month. This is a very comfortable number for us, especially when you consider the tax benefits of owning a home.
Our gross annual income is $150,460, not including my wife’s quarterly bonuses. Using the rule of thumb to spend no more than 35% of our gross income on housing, we can “afford” $4,388/month. Frankly, we had no intentions of spending anywhere close to that. We simply want a nice home with payments that we can still afford if one of us lost our job.
Our retirement accounts balance (401k, Roth IRA, and Traditional IRA) just passed $70,000! As of this morning, our total retirement savings is $70,169.27. Still a long way to go to early retirement, but we’re on our way.
I just finished rebalancing my 401(k) to move our current asset allocation back in line to ouroriginally planned asset allocation.
The percentages weren’t off by much, but I figure this is a good habit for us to get into at the end of each year. Here’s what the 401(k) looked like:
Here’s what it was rebalanced to:
My wife’s 401(k) was opened mid way through the year and is a much smaller balance, so we’re not going to bother rebalancing it this year.
We’ve wanted to contribute at least 10% to each of our 401(k)’s for a while now. My wife just increased her 401(k) contribution to 15% in August, but mine was only at 8%. I’m happy to say that I’ve now increased my 401(k) contribution to 15%, effective my 1st paycheck in January.
If we’re both able to keep our jobs throughout 2010, we’ll contribute a total of $18,366 to our 401(k) accounts from our regular paychecks. My wife also has 15% contributed from her quarterly bonus checks. God willing, we may be able to break $20K in total contributions to our 401(k)’s in 2010.
As a follow on to my post yesterday regarding our increased retirement contributions, I checked our retirement account balances this morning and we just broke the $50,000 mark. I’ll provide the specifics when I post our net worth spreadsheet at the end of the month, but it feels great to be making solid progress. In December 2008, our retirement accounts totaled $23,506.87, so it’s doubled in less than 1 year.
We’ve done a good job of increasing our retirement account contributions this year. Thus far, we’ve contributed $3,802.39 to my 401(k) and $3,976.48 to my wife’s 401(k) and a total of $8,400 ($4,200 each) to our Roth IRA’s. That puts us at $16,178.87 in total contributions to our retirement accounts so far for the year.
By the end of the year, another $617.91 will be contributed to my 401(k) and another $1,040.63 to my wife’s 401(k). We hope to contribute another $800 to each of our Roth IRAs to fully fund them for the year. If we’re able to do that, we’d have a total retirement account contribution of $19,437.41 (roughly $1,620/month) for 2009. That’s a huge increase over our $12,111.56 retirement contributions in 2008 and our $12,330.19 retirement contributions in 2007. We’re feel very blessed to be able to sock this kind of money away for early retirement.
I always feel like we could be doing more to reach our goal of early retirement, but am very thankful for all of our blessings. I’m also thankful for my parents for being such great personal finance role models.
We’ve been working hard to increase the contributions to our retirement accounts and have done a good job over the past 6 months. Our average monthly contribution since May has been $1,453.
Here’s a month-by-month breakdown:
May
$1,025.19
June
$1,675.19
July
$1,743.52
August
$1,181.48
September
$1,592.71
October
~$1,500.00
We increased my Wife’s 401(k) contribution from 5% to 15%. This takes her contribution from $2,775/year to $8,325/year. We’re still waiting to hear back from her HR department as to when the new contribution level go into effect.
We decided to increase our 401(k) contributions as much as possible and force ourselves to get used to the lower take home pay. We may not be able to put as much into our Roth IRA’s, but at least we know the money will be invested before we can get our hands on it.
My wife’s eligible to contribute to her new company’s 401(k) beginning next month. She completed the online forms over the weekend and will begin contribution 5% of her pay in May. It works out to be a $115.63 contribution per check or $2,775.12 per year. I’m currently contributing 5% to my 401(k) plan ($3,171.15/year) and we’re hoping to max out our Roth IRA contributions this year ($5,000 each). So far, we’ve contributed $2,000 this year towards our $10,000 total contribution.
If we’re able to fully fund our Roth IRA’s and don’t make any other changes to our 401(k) plans, we’ll be looking at a total contribution to our retirement accounts this year of $15,946.15. This is 13.41% of our gross income – not including any bonuses that my wife receives. If successful, this will be the largest percentage of our income we have invested to our retirement accounts. Ideally, we will slowly increase this percentage every year.