The Carnival of Personal Finance #81 is up at Mighty Bargain Hunter this week. A number of great articles as usual and a great way to start out the new year. Go check it out – you might even find an article from me in there.
I know I just wrote about how I have never kept a budget for my expenditures, well another potentially taboo thing that I just realized that I fail to do is balance my checkbook, at least in the traditional sense of the word. I guess things are a lot different these days with the invention of that internet thing and internet banking, but the only time I have ever had to balance a checkbook was in my high school record keeping class. Which I believe was right after my personal typing class (we actually used typewriters and correction tape and there was no such thing as a Backspace button)
I have been out on my own with full-time job now for about 6 years and during this time I have never made a budget. I got married in 2003, bought a house in 2004, and yet I have never ever found the need to create a budget. I even find tracking my expenses in Quicken to be too much of a hassle and I have never made it more than 2 or 3 months in a row before I give up entirely on the process.
Well my retirement nestegg grew by 3% this month, which is great, but more importantly my retirement nestegg grew by 90.61% this year. Granted a majority of this gain is due to the fact that my nestegg is so small and a majority of the gains were due directly to my contributions, but it still is nice to see your retirement account nearly double in one calendar year regardless of the reason. One a side note as far as investment performance because my traditional 401k has not had any contributions this year I can easily calculate the investment performance of my 401k investments, which ended up being 15.26%, which bested the market by about 1.5% this year.
Well 2006 is coming to a close and I figured I would check in on how I am progressing on my goal to have $100,000 in principal (solely my contributions) contributed to my various retirement plans. Here is my contribution table my initial planning post on reaching $100k by 30.
Well I’ve been doing a lot of interviewing lately and I’m starting to realize now that I’m worried less about the interview questions that the employer will spring on me than I am trying to come up with good questions for the person interviewing me to help me learn more about them and their company.
I recently went ahead and finally got the ball rolling as far as getting a life insurance policy for my wife. Seeing as how we already have one kid and another on the way it is pretty important for us to make sure that our family would be taken care of if anything bad happened to either of us.
EDIT: This is now outdated…there was a typo in the underwriting process and we were able to get the top rate…see more in the comments.