Well it is time for my annual check up on my $100,000 by age 30 goal. I guess I had a little foresight when setting up this goal as it is based solely on principal (my contributions) and investment performance does not matter. This way everything is under my control and I am not hurt or helped by short-term swings in the stock market. Which is good because currently my contributions are roughly $19,000 of my current nest egg value 🙂

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.

As you can see I’m actually a little ahead of schedule and I have a pretty good chance of achieving my goal by my birthday in August and won’t need the whole calendar year like I originally thought I would. I have $12,636 to go and assuming I keep my job for the rest of the year I should be able to commit ~$1500 a month needed to meet my goal.

The whole idea with this goal was that by having $100k invested before I was 30 I would have a great jump start on my retirement and could let the power of time and compound interest work their magic. Then at that point in time I could sort of put things on cruise control or if I were to choose to start putting that money towards another cause that was important to me (kids education, new house, vacations, etc) and it would not jeopardize my retirement.

With the market the way it is now I think I would be stupid to stop investing after I reached my goal and no matter what I will always contribute a pretty good chunk of my salary into investments, but I do have another immediate goal and that is to start aggressively saving for a new house and my own full court basketball court. So once I get to my $100k by age 30 goal I will probably cut my retirement contributions in half in the short-term to help fund the new house fund.

Regardless this goal and this blog have been vital tools for me to keep me on the right track financially and I can’t recommend enough for those of you who are planning your future to put your goals down on paper/web page somewhere and revisit them on a regular basis. It has been pretty amazing what I’ve been able to accomplish (I never thought I had a chance at this goal) and I know this goal and this blog played a vital role in it.