Financial Craziness

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.