Hi personalfinance. I'm using a throwaway account so my financial information is not associated with my main account.
I'm 35 years old and living in the US. After years of college, graduate school, and post-graduate training I finally landed my first well-paying job. Starting in May my salary will be 125k. This more than doubles my previous income and will hopefully allow us to make some headway on our debts. My wife makes about 30k so our total combined income will be about 155k. We'd like to rent (<$2000/mo.) for at least another year so that we could focus on eliminating debt first. After that we'd like to buy a house but not until we can make a 20% down payment (at least). We don't have any car payments but even with a 50% employer subsidy our family health insurance plan will still cost us about $11000/year. The job provides a 401(k) but does not match contributions. Instead they told me they typically pay out a monthly bonus that averages out to around 10% of my monthly pay.
We currently have about 42k in debut, about 39k of which is in the form of student loans. The other 3k is from a furniture purchase that's being financed at 0% APR (the student loan interest rates range from 2.4% to about 6%). We currently have about 18k in savings but are holding on to that for now to cover moving expenses, security deposits, etc. I have a 403(b) with my present employer but it only has about $1200 in it, and my wife has a 401(k) with about $1400 in it. I estimate that after all our expenses, taxes, etc. we should be able to net about 4k - 5k per month. We'd probably need about 90k to put 20% down on the size house we want plus cover closing costs.
One of my main concerns is that we don't have hardly any money saved for retirement. I'm not sure if it's a good strategy to use the company 401(k) if they don't provide any matching. Would an IRA or Roth IRA be a good alternative or addition?
Would it be better to pay off the student loan debt before diverting money into a 401(k) or other retirement accounts, or is it smarter to start putting money in right away so that it builds interest?
And what about saving for a house? Right now the money is just going into our savings account, but would it make more sense to put into something like a CD until we're ready to use it?
Submitted March 30, 2017 at 09:50AM by jnkact82837 http://ift.tt/2mSGZUG
