Hi all! As mentioned above, I'm a woman in my mid-thirties and am just now getting my head around planning financially for my future. I spent the first two years of the last five just getting my shit straightened out, and the next three working on building a life + career I'm proud of. Unfortunately for my Personal Finance situation, I work in a not-terribly-lucrative creative field. I've been freelancing until recently, and I finally managed to land a full-time gig.
I've looked through the flowchart, and my extremely ADHD brain is feeling totally overwhelmed. Once I realized how many tabs I'd opened trying to figure out where I'm at on the chart, I figured I'd just bring my situation here + interface with some real humans.
Here's the deal:
I make $85k a year, and my wife makes $40k.
My wife is not investing in retirement yet, I need to figure that out (I am the money person in our family).
I've only just started saving/investing, but here's where I'm at:
- My job offers a 401(k) Profit Sharing Plan
- To be completely frank, I'm not even sure what this is or how it differs from a regular 401k. But I'm putting 20% of my income in a "PRE-TAX Employee Deferral" and an additional 2% in a "Roth deferral."
- They match the first 3%.
- I also have a Roth IRA through Vanguard I started when I was freelancing. It has about $7k in it.
- My wife has nothing invested.
- Either her (very new) job doesn't contribute anything for a year or doesn't offer a 401k plan for a year. She isn't clear on that, so we'll need to figure it out.
- A major question I have is about couples with different amounts of money in their 401k plans. How do married people think about that? I want to make sure she's safe no matter what, so do most married folks help with contributions to the other partner's retirement plan if there's a major difference in earnings? That was my plan.
- This is absurd, but we have $55k in a few checking accounts (mine, hers, a shared) and no savings. I had a high-yield account through Marcus/GS, but I just closed it in anticipation of opening a shared account before getting all turned around on what I should do next.
- We have a couple credit cards, both pretty basic w/ no rewards, no balance.
- College is paid off, no car payments, no other debt outside of our mortgage.
- We own a house and still owe about $65k. The loan end date is in 2048, but according to their little calculator, we could comfortably pay down the principle a lot faster and have it paid off by 2029. That is, of course, if this is where I should be throwing my money. (Our house was really affordable because of how limited our pre-approval was as freelancers.)
- Figuring out a budget is next on the list, but I thought maybe it would help to see the ideal amount of money we should be saving/investing to help me get my head around that. I'm really hoping to find some kind of app or program for that...
And that is basically it. It almost feels like I don't know how much money we actually have because I don't know where it is supposed to go. I don't know what the hell to do next. Help?
Submitted April 28, 2022 at 12:22AM by L-Blue https://ift.tt/W2dUx4c
