Things are going well for us financially and we are looking ahead to the future and the kids. In a way that matters looking ahead at the future is easy. It's easy to say wow we are good. I'm not worried and relaxed and breathe.
But taking time to smell the roses is harder. It's the here and now. Right now looking at ourselves and saying are we really enjoying our money? Are we really enjoying our time? That's two really hard questions.
This past year, and it's literally been 1 year, has been a lesson in budgeting I haven't struggled with since 2015-2016 when we went without income and took a sabbatical. Since then things really relaxed again and we didn't budget. We didn't really budget from 2010-2015 after we had kids but lived on a "pot" of money. And all this time we have been really comfortable. We didn't really want for anything, and honestly we still don't.
But a couple things have changed in this past year and last weekend when we were away DH made a comment to me "I don't want to worry about money period. I want to spend to enjoy the time we have when we have because I think we now have too much money and not enough time." I fully agree, so much so that I want him to quit working asap. I want him to realize the kids are growing too fast and all these snippets of time is sliding by.
So we are sort of having a windfall and I might as post it here since I did it on the forum that it's around $320k after taxes. It's not an inheritance we earned this. My inclination is to save it all. But I know my DH doesn't want to. He wants to see a tangible spending of this money for something we want but don't need and aren't being "responsible". But I am really struggling with that perspective.
I want to save 50% to kids college/brokerage. I struggle with putting it all into 529 because we already have around $40-50k per kid right now and more years to save. But at the same time the opportunity to dump$75k into each 529 seems tempting. Then i'd like to save $20k to ibonds this year and next year. That leaves us with $80k. Do we spend it? Do we save it?
I don't know. And if so how much can we allow ourselves to spend? I feel our lifestyle is very nice and I would like to not budget but other than that I dont' know I'm ready to get nicer stuff than I have.
March 1st, 2022 at 11:11 pm 1646176294
Another exercise is to list your values in single words like honesty, peace, security…get to 20-30.
Then review the list and pick the one you would sacrifice for the others. Do that until you are down to one. You now know your values in order. Again, do jointly or separate and then talk about your results and agree to a joint list.
Start with the top one and think what it would take to live that value, and how money impacts that. Work your way down. You will know when you are done because it will get repetitive.
Both of these exercises will help you think about how you want to use money.
And at this moment, I would keep a windfall in cash because the world economic situation is very uncertain and waiting a few months to invest in the market seems smart to me. But of course, you must do you…
March 2nd, 2022 at 03:58 am 1646193500
I don't withdraw money out of investments once in never out. We rarely rebalance either. I just am invested in mostly voo and qqq and sorry I have a bunch in other etfs. Nothing major in stocks. IJR, IXN, IYW and IYH. Lots of etfs sorry but not much in individuals stocks except some from years ago we never sold like google, paypal, amzn, fb, amd, dis. We are pretty boring. And i've never taken out money from any investments either taxable or retirement. Once it's gone it's gone. So we are pretty cautious about investing our cash.
I tend to hoard cash in case of emergencies.
March 4th, 2022 at 07:37 am 1646379441