slowly but surely, i'm getting my act together.
it started with paying off my school debt, then my tax debt and now, it's about securing my retirement. my father would probably look at this as 'worrying' and not trusting in the Lord but that's why we have IRAs, so i won't have to bother the Lord about my retirement.
i spoke with a fund guy this morning and felt mature while doing it but also like i was totally faking it. but the long and short of it is now i have a diversified fund that will grow aggressively over the next few years and then we'll start taking it back a notch as i get older and more risk-averse. the end point? i think the goal is to accrue as close to a million dollars by the time i retire (if i remember the prospectus correctly.)
a bonus: next year, i can access some money for italy (which i've also started saving for) and the penalty actually isn't that bad if it's under $1000. heh.
what's next on the adulthood checklist?
perhaps buying property (only after italy and figuring out my next job move, which may have just presented itself at work)
perhaps, uh, another person (however, the likelihood of that is remarkably slim; i have more chance of going around the world than that)
or perhaps the next step in my march toward adulthood is just buying a grown up bed.
7 comments:
Crap, the retirement shit. We cashed in our Roths when we bought the house in Canada, and now I've got squat.
I'm in a pretty good place for retirement. But I'll be in an even better place once I get a teaching job in China.
I have a friend that makes just as much as he did in Seattle... only the school pays for his housing, so his expenses total $200 a month. Every month he invests thousands in investments/retirement, and still saves enough for occasional fabulous vacations in Asia.
A million bucks. Nice. Even accounting for increases in cost of living, that's still a lot isn't it? Those are some very nice beds, by the way. You should totally get one.
Sorry if I'm repeating myself, but this question's been bugging me as I climb that class ladder: How come money stuff = adulthood? We all do it (myself included), but really, why is moving solidly into the middle class equivalent with being responsible? Maybe I'm just keenly aware of this having finally invited my extended family over to see the house we bought last year, and we got so much praise for it--complete with loot. Conversely, when I finished my 11 years of schooling, and landed a tenure-track job in SoCal, no one outside of my immedieate family so much as blinked.
On an entirely separate note, my blog's at http://whatareyousavingitfor.blogspot.com/
bitch: the only reason i have this is because of the corporate world. i didn't start paying attention to any of this until just now. actually, until i started arguing with my dad about his own crappy retirement situation and i decided that i do NOT want to end up like that.
jp: you've always been really canny about your cash. i remember when you were going through all that refinancing stuff. my mind boggled.
liza: i blame our middle class aspiring parents. adulthood=cash is so capitalist. and bourgeois. we've adhered to the codes of our middle class social training when we buy into (interesting phrase) those things that support socio-economic structure: private property ownership, accumulation of liquid wealth, reproduction for the sake of the (male) family line, solidification of heterosexual bonds (like marriage or at least long term cohabitation.)
even though i know i don't have the heart or budget to buy a place, i'm feeling the pressure to chuck everything into the lap of a mortgage broker and look at real estate. how many times have we talked with friends and they've said, 'my tax guy told me i either have to have a kid soon or buy a place.' and they say it with such moroseness!!
and we do it! we either have a kid or we buy a place. or we do both. it's our training. we're lemmings in the face of our capitalist imperative.
oh, and that bed?
$60,000.
dude. that's a yearly salary.
Get a reasonably priced grown-up bed. Queen size. Don't buy a full size. And nice linens. You will never regret it. And those summer flings, they won't regret it.
Here's the best argument for real estate: It lets you more or less lock in housing costs for years to come (aside from property tax increases). We bought our condo in '93. Fourteen years later, other units are selling for almost three times what we paid. We refinanced our mortgage when rates were good and got a shorter term (now in a 15-year loan, so the place will be paid off when the kid starts college if we don't move) without seeing our monthly payment go up much at all. For a two-bedroom, one-bath joint (roughly in Lakeview) with a spacious living room, some nice mouldings, and a good-sized dining room, we're paying about $850 a month, including property taxes, heat, water, and gas. If we sold the place today, we'd pocket over $150,000 of gains in equity. It's like free money! And five or ten years from now, we'll still be paying $850 a month (maybe a bit more if taxes rise). Does it not sound tempting?
it would if i understood any of those words...
no, really. i understand. getting property makes fiduciary sense. it scares the crap out of me.
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