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Financial Craziness

December 13, 2007   

Let’s see… Today, I did the following:

  • Called my previous employer about the fact that they were still paying me a full salary even though I had left my job on October 19th. They also owe me for PTO, so the numbers aren’t too unbalanced, but it’s a mess.
  • Opened a Vanguard account. Finally, after months and months, heck, almost more than a year of researching! This is where we’ll do our investing. We’ll keep a fixed amount of money in our high-interest savings account for the upstairs renovation and short-term emergencies and apply all our excess income here (minus any acceleration we plan to apply to the HELOCs or first mortgages — boy, I hate that those are both plurals). I opened up a joint account for a target retirement year fund with the minimum required amount, and plan to put more money in it semi-monthly out of our savings account until we hit the fixed amount we plan to hold in savings. I could have put it all in now, but I wanted to do the whole “dollar cost averaging” thing, thus the semi-monthly schedule.
  • Moved some money from the high-interest savings account to the checking account in preparation to pay off the student loan. Because I don’t get any tax advantage from the student loan due to our high combined income, we decided that even with a lower interest rate, it was worth paying this off faster than the HELOCs.
  • Called to schedule an consultation with the kitchen specialist that worked on our neighbor’s kitchen. 
Now all I have left to do for the rest of the week is to return some library books, plan dinner, pack for my trip to Atlanta, and plan the Rock Band party food. Oh, if TurboTax is ready for 2007 already, I might run some numbers just to see how things fall. I have some shares of that awful company I worked for two jobs ago that could potentially be useful to sell in order to take a loss.
I am such an adult that it makes me ill. 😀

3 Comments
h
December 14, 2007 at 4:28 pm

Hooray for Vanguard. That’s where I invest as well.

I a big chunk of retirement money in Vanguard’s “500 Index” Fund. It has a lower expense ratio than the “target year” funds, and their performance lines are basically parallel. But I’ve been considering moving to the target year fund so that I won’t have to think about asset allocation over time.

Rock Band Party = not TOO too adult yet. 🙂

h
December 14, 2007 at 4:31 pm

Oh, I meant to ask: You said “this is where we’ll do our investing”, which led me to think about non-retirement investing, but then you talked about retirement target year funds, which made me think you were talking about IRAs. Which were you talking about?

ei-nyung
December 14, 2007 at 4:41 pm

Yeah, they are solely for retirement, but not either of the tax sheltered IRAs, because we actually exceed the income requirements for contributing to a Roth or traditional IRA.

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