How's your retirement account doing?

[hal2kilo]

This ^ guy fucks ...

And to add, after 65 you can withdraw (without penalty) for anything. It doesn't have to be medical related.

I missed that train. Boy, HSA's sure evolved. Did it for a couple years to get useless Lasick surgery. I, of course I just missed the RLE train or whatever it is, when I had my cataract surgery. Even paid extra to have them super matched, yet here I sit typing with glasses on.

 

[skyking]

HSAs are triple taxed advantaged. (1) No tax on money that goes in. (2) No tax on money as it grows. (3) No tax on money as you withdraw it as long as it is spent on medical purposes that start at ANY point after you first opened any HSA account*. With triple tax advantages, the HSA should be the first place to put any retirement funds beyond your 401k minimum to get a match if you have the option to invest in your HSA.

* Meaning if you opened that HSA in lets say 2019, then any medical bill from 2019 until the day you die counts as medical spending that you can reimburse yourself untaxed at any moment that you need cash.

HSA's are not available to everyone. Our medical insurance was too good, thanks to my union and my wife's employer.


Qualifications:

• Be covered by a high-deductible health plan (HDHP) on the first day of the month.
• Not be covered by other health insurance (see Publication 969 for exceptions)
• Not be enrolled in Medicare (the individual can be HSA-eligible for the months before being covered by Medicare)

We Maxed our Roth contributions and my wife's 403B, but I have no options with my pension, and she does not get a percentage match from her employer on the 401K.
She does get a fixed profit sharing contribution that drops in March.
She will stick around until next March to catch that one, and we will dial up her 403B to max it out. She will have no taxable income next year

 

[Exterous]

To the point on balancing living now vs saving for retirement - we spent time figuring out what we wanted to do. What brings us happiness so we could budget and save around that. For us it wasn't our cars, getting doordash every day, or renovating every room in the house. For us it's spending a fair amount on travel and experiences while staying with a 12 year old car, doing most of our own cooking, home repairs and occasional renovations with a goal of retiring before 50.

As an example we managed to travel to Germany for a week for $550 a person and stay in an Airbnb for less than $200/ day sleeping 5. Costs way more to fly the family to Disney.

We did the Canary islands last winter not because we necessarily wanted to but because it was way less than than the Caribbean and a number of places in the southern US when we could travel in the winter. Some willingness to be flexible on destination can go a long way. Some people really just have to go to one specific location and nothing else will do. Canary Islands did not disappoint.

 

[MtnMan]

Some old people will tell you to save when you're young and plan for retirement and other old people will tell you go live your life. I went with the second one and I don't regret it. I pissed away all sorts of retirement money buying avgas when it was less than two bucks a gallon.

Are you retied?

 

[skyking]

Are you retied?

I have ~1 year to go. We are building a house 100 miles away, and so long as work does not get in the way I will work until we get close to occupancy.
If work starts to interfere too much, it will have to go!

 

[Zorba]

If you are young you don't need to keep checking on something like that. It's investing, not trading.

When I market it's doing well, I look at least a few times a week when the market sucks I rarely look.

 

[Leeea]

my retirement account? sadly.

my equity in my home? it is still skyrocketing

thank the Goddess for the per year cap on property tax rate increase in CA.

on the flip side, God help the next person who has to buy a home around here.

 

[dullard]

If you are young you don't need to keep checking on something like that. It's investing, not trading.

I agree with you but do want to point out a little tale of caution.

My company recently found out that half of the 401k participants had never checked their accounts. Meaning they had never logged in. Meaning they had never set up beneficiaries.

You shouldn't watch your retirement accounts frequently. But at least do the bare minimum to log in once a year or so and make sure your contact information (address, phone numbers, emails) and beneficiaries are up to date! Once a year is also a decent period to rebalance the accounts (which forces yourself to sell high and buy low without any real analysis needed).

 

[dullard]

To actually answer the OP's question, I'm up 23.9% last year and up another 4.2% so far this year. But that is paper money until I actually cash it out. It can and will fall at some point.

 

[iRONic]

There are more worthy people out there. I'm not one of them. TY

There are just as many unworthy people out there who got one. Just sayin...

 

[Drach]

Ty. I'm not the one that deserves the second chance but I do thank you for your concern. I hope your family lives a long and prosperous life.

 

[fleshconsumed]

All of my retirement is invested into low cost sp500 index ETFs so it's doing very well. I did some math recently, and we'd be CoastFIRE, but we're trying for a baby, and we still need a house, both of those are going to put a huge dent into our finances, so going to have to keep grinding my soul away for the next 20 years.

 

[Muse]

Still quite a ways off but in my 20's I made a shit ton but saved almost nothing. Even lost my condo in 2008!
30's I started saving.
40's I'm saving more and more!

My only piece of advice.. DO NOT GET A LIVE IN SIGNIFICANT OTHER.

The moment you do.. your expenses TRIPLE!

Ofcourse I'm not doing too well following my own last bit of advice!

I thought they said "two can live as cheaply as one."

 

[Muse]

All of my retirement is invested into low cost sp500 index ETFs so it's doing very well. I did some math recently, and we'd be CoastFIRE, but we're trying for a baby, and we still need a house, both of those are going to put a huge dent into our finances, so going to have to keep grinding my soul away for the next 20 years.

Same here. That's exactly what Warren Buffett says the average investor should do. Myself, I have buy and sell signals but that's me. It's simple, a 6 year old could follow my rules. But it requires discipline, I found that out the hard way. The market is finally behaving, but we'll see.

I tried hard to make headway trading individual stocks for a time and the market itself was trouncing me. So, I now just sit in the SPY (SP500 index fund). I figure QQQ might be a better idea but I haven't back tested it, which I did do with the SPY.

 

[nOOky]

The downside of all this for the business I work at is that we have 3 employees that are very knowledgeable in key positions retiring. I work for a private family owned company and the owner is a Republican. It grates on him that he's losing people because their retirement is doing so well that they are deciding to get out now versus in a couple years. One is an IT guy and we have a transition to a completely different system from our legacy system and he did some programming in AX for us. People here like to retire early in the year after the holidays and take their pay from accrued vacation and have gotten their Christmas and end of the year bonuses.

 

[Brainonska511]

The downside of all this for the business I work at is that we have 3 employees that are very knowledgeable in key positions retiring. I work for a private family owned company and the owner is a Republican. It grates on him that he's losing people because their retirement is doing so well that they are deciding to get out now versus in a couple years. One is an IT guy and we have a transition to a completely different system from our legacy system and he did some programming in AX for us. People here like to retire early in the year after the holidays and take their pay from accrued vacation and have gotten their Christmas and end of the year bonuses.

Sounds like the business you work at is not properly managing risk and knowledge sharing.