It has been a minute since I did an update and blog post as life has been a little crazy and a little hard lately. If you follow me on social media, you may have seen that we’ve been dealing with infertility and that has taken up a lot of my mental capacity lately. But I wanted to do a mid-year (ish) review of where we are currently at with our money goals for this year. At this point it’s more like a 3/4 of the way into the year review now….but I digress.
I will preface by saying that like many people, we are really feeling the impact of high inflation this year. We have not been able to make as much progress yet with our goals, because literally everything costs SO much more than it did even a year ago.
In addition, we have had several really unexpected and pretty significant costs come up this year with car repairs (roughly $5k so far this year) and unforeseen medical costs (roughly $6k so far).
But we are continuing to chip away at our goals and hoping to still meet them by the end of the year. Especially because I typically get my annual bonus in November, which helps a lot with reaching my goals by the end of the year
We still have 4 more months to make this happen.
Let’s go!
Money Goals
Save and invest $60,000.
Our goal for 2022 was to save and invest at least $60,000.
This breaks down to $5,000 per month.
But really our saving/investing this year has not been that linear. It has looked more like $10k one month, $2k one month, $3k one month and so forth, based on us covering unexpected costs and then paying debt off (hello inflation).
Progress: As of August 24, we are 42% of the way there having invested $25,395 YTD.
Max out 401(k).
I have 12% automatically taken out of each paycheck. Plus my employer contributes 7.5% of my salary in one payment each year so this equates to contributing 19.5% of my salary to this account until I max it out.
Employee Contributions: $9,936
Employer Contributions: $10,125
Total YTD: $20,061
Goal: $20,500
Progress: Only one more contribution and it will be maxed out.
Max out two Roth IRAs.
The maximum amount a person can contribute to their Roth account is $6,000 per year. For more info about Roth accounts, see my post, A Powerful Tool to Reach Financial Independence: The Roth IRA. We try to max out these accounts early on in the year so once we fill these buckets, we can just sit and watch it grow.
Total YTD: $0
Goal: $12,000
Progress: We haven’t made any progress YET on this. But we will start contributing to these accounts this month and max out by year end.
Grow investment account for our son.
Right now we are just automatically transferring $200 per month into our regular taxable brokerage account for him. If you start investing $200 a month for your child (in low cost index funds) and continue doing so until they are 18 years old, your child will have about $100k by 18. Not bad eh!
Total YTD: $1,600
Goal: invest at least $1,500
Progress: Met this pretty modest goal and exceeded it so far by an extra $100!
Max out HSA.
I’ve said this before, but I will say it again! An HSA is the holy grail of investment accounts for FIRE. It You can only open up this type of savings account if you have a high-deductible health plan (HDHP). If you are unsure about whether you have that, check with your benefits team at your place of work.
The reason I love it is because it offers you a triple-tax benefit. This means you can (1) contribute to them on a pretax or tax-deductible basis, (2) your savings grow free of taxes over time and (3) you can also make tax-free withdrawals to cover qualified medical expenses.
The IRS has increased the contribution limit to a total of $7,300 for family coverage. For individual coverage, you can contribute up to $3,650 in 2022.
I am contributing $300 per month, plus my employer contributes $125 per month. Then I will take money from my bonus to max this out at the end of the year.
Total YTD: $3,733
Goal: $7,300 to HSA
Progress: 51% of the way to this goal.
Grow taxable brokerage accounts.
In addition to contributing to our retirement accounts, we are working on growing our taxable brokerage accounts. My husbands manages one account and is an active trader. I manage a second account which I just invest in index funds and leave it to grow over the long term.
Total YTD: $0
Goal: Invest $10,00
Progress: We haven’t been able to prioritize these accounts yet but we plan to once 401(k) and Roth IRAs are done!
Have $300k invested.
Welp. I wrote this before I knew what the stock market would be like in 2022….ha.
So far, our investment accounts are down well over $30k. But I am not worried. The market will always rebound and we will continue to pour as much as we can. And when the market rebounds, I think we will hit this goal – it is truly just a matter of time.
Give more.
One of my goals was to focus on being more generous this year and giving more to people in need. I don’t have a specific number tied to this, but I’ve been trying find opportunities for random acts of kindness throughout the year and would like to ramp this up and be more intentional as the year progresses.
So there you have it. We have a ways to go to meet the rest of our money goals this year but I think we can do it!
I’d love to hear from you. How are your 2022 goals coming along?
