My Financial Journey

I figured this would be a good time to check up on my $100,000 by age 30 goal. I have a feeling that I’m actually falling behind on this one as I know I have over $3,000 in Roth IRA deposits that I am behind on. I’m pretty sure I have the money to make the deposits and they will likely be deposited in the next couple weeks, but unfortunately they will not make this report.

The whole idea of this goal was to make sure that I was in a good situation in regards to my retirement planning. You can go ahead and read the original post here, but idea was to give myself an aggressive savings goal that would have me well on my way in my retirement planning. You can see where I currently stand vs my original plan below.
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If you follow my blog you know I have a goal of having $100,000 in principal put away by the time I reach 30, I have also talked about how I would like to make $100,000 per year by the time I reach 30, I’m currently working out plans for other goals, such as when I should reach $1 million dollars and possibly how much money I need to retire early (in my 40s). This goal however is going to seem somewhat counterintuitive to those goals. In roughly 5 years time I want to have enough money put away so that I can build a house out in the country with a full court outdoor sportcourt basketball/volleyball/tennis/etc court.
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I will be hosting the Festival of Under 30 Finances this Friday and as part of the Festival I asked the submitters a question

“At what age do you want/plan to be financially independent (IE you don’t have to work full-time if you don’t want to) and what is your plan to get there.”

I figured I’d take a quick stab at the question myself. As you may or may not know I have a goal to have put away $100,000 in principal by the time I reach age 30. I’ve been making pretty good pace with that goal and I see myself reaching it, but it really doesn’t say much about my long term aspirations and goals. Theoretically speaking I could quit saving completely at age 30 and if I waited till I was 60 to retire and got 8% return on my money – I would have over $1 million dollars at age 60. Certainly $1 million dollars won’t exactly let me live the life of luxury in retirement, but I could probably survive. I however don’t plan on stopping my retirement savings once I reach 30 so I can probably shoot a little higher.
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I just realized I never checked in on my progress for 2006 for my $100,000 by age 30 goal.  I know I was ahead of schedule, but figured it would do me good to get a detailed list of goals vs actuals.  Plus it will make it easier for me to keep track of my progress in 2007
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Well another good month for my total retirement nest egg as I broke the $50,000 barrier.  It was due entirely to contributions though as my investments all were in the red this month, partially due to yesterdays little dip.  As much as it’s fun to see me break the $50k mark I’d love it if yesterdays trend continued for a while and we went into a major bear market as I’d love to pick some more investments up on the cheap.  One thing to note is that I now have a new retirement plan on the list as I recently switched jobs.  Anyway here are the numbers.

My Roth IRA – $11,080.30 (-2.52%)  
Wife Roth IRA – $13,984.38 (-1.68%)
Old Employer Traditional 401K – $11,807.45 (-1.05%)
Old Employer Roth 401K – $12,797.47 (+12.20%)
Current Traditional 401k – $617.67 (new)

Roth/Traditional % = 75.29% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $50,287.27 (+2.77%)

Well my blog has been around for over a year now so I guess I can start highlighting some posts from a year ago. I think this is kind of nice because I can occasionally see what I was thinking a year ago. See if my attitudes have changed, if I’ve learned anything new since then, etc. I probably won’t do this too often as well my blog hit a dry spell for a while last summer, but one year ago this week was a pretty good one for my blog.

• It’s common sense, but I’m an idiot – realized how to do simple math to decide whether to pay off HELOC or not
• $100,000 by Age 30 – came up with my first financial goal. It’s been a popular post for me.
• PFBlogs.org – Site was born about this time last year and MFJ has been a friend of ever since – best aggregator around
• Credit cards better for my net worth than high yield savings like ING Direct? – Realized the joys of rewards cards
• Wal-Mart wallet photos for a whole lot less – Method I came up with to save money on wallet photos.

When I originally set my $100,000 by age 30 goal I needed to sort of cheat and I made the goal to have $100,000 in principal (money I contributed) in my retirement accounts by Dec 31 of the year in which I turn 30. My birthday is in August and well according to my original calculations I would need at least those extra 4 months to reach my goal.

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