It's hard to post your numbers on even a blog. To post the failures and successes. Even though we hide behind our screens there is still a feeling of awkwardness. To have a feeling of embarrassement that you are spending so much. Well at least to me. It's probably why I hesitate to post certain things because I know I'm ridiculous. But it's still way more than I would ever share IRL.
So anyway I started multiple "savings" accounts in Capital One. Thought I'd give it a whirl. I thought I'm going to do it. I'm going to try and save this year money. Sounds ridiculous because we should be able to save. But the truth is I don't know if we can. We are going to struggle. Living "austerely" to us when we haven't been on a spending "diet" or "budget" is hard. We've gotten used to lifestyle inflation or creep. It hasn't happened overnight. It hasn't been drastic. But it's happened. How'd it happen? Well our income went up and so did our lifestyle. We hadn't changed some of our basic principals LBYM or pay yourself first. But we "paid" ourselves first, maxed our 401k, maxed our Roth IRA, College, no bonuses for living but our income just went up and with it our lifestyle. Last year I roughly calculated we saved 50% of our income. But we had a lot of income. We lived on about 25% of our income and 25% of our income went to taxes. Sounds okay right? Well now we're cutting back to that 25% and we need to save within it. That's another post for another day.
Anyway here's where we are and goals for 2021. Who knew I'd have goals again so concrete?
Roth IRA/ESA $16k goal - $3k
Property Taxes $12k goal - $1k ($6500 coming from bank) (4./30 and 11/1 due $5500, 8/30 Home insurance $1000)
Sink Funds $10k goal - $1k
That's all I got for now. With an extra paycheck this month I'm planning on funding the property taxes and sink funds. I also have quite a bit of extra cash in our checking accounts so I'm going to try and move it into one of these savings accounts.
Big picture goal is to save 20% of our income. We have currently saved 20% this year of our income. But 2022 we won't have a 401k to contribute just a Roth IRA and 2 ESA so $16k in tax deferred accounts. That still leaves us short of that 20% salary goal, and I'm unsure if we can even hit that. Though we've contributed to 2020 Roth IRA and ESAs, I'm trying to get the $16k cash for january 2022. I'm also planning on shoveling into that savings account all exra money and seeing if I can get more after directly $1k and $800/monthly into Property taxes and Sink Funds. This will be pretty tight to be honest.
Let's see what happens. Next year DH's salary will be $180k flat. 20% is $36k. $16k is earmarked to be saved. $20k is what we need to save in order to hit 20%. I guess that's another post about why I think it'll be hard.
March 24th, 2021 at 03:10 pm 1616598627
March 24th, 2021 at 06:13 pm 1616609592
March 24th, 2021 at 07:57 pm 1616615861
One thing might be to write everything down that you spend and look at what you can cut down or cut out and then save that.
March 25th, 2021 at 09:10 pm 1616706626