2019 Highlights
- LO grew from ~2 months to 14 months! She started nanny share, then she started daycare, and is thriving. She rolled, she sat, she started solids, she crawled, she walked, she clapped, she babbled, she talked.
- We just barely hit a 50% savings rate by my calculation method (which is imperfect, but adequate for the purpose of competing against myself).
- I lost about a month of income due to part of my maternity leave being unpaid. The rest was paid with banked vacation and sick leave that I’d hoarded for years.
- We maxed out our tax deferred space and two Roth IRAs. Hooray!
- We opened a 529 for LO to house gifts, and started her off with $1k. Her cash gift total for 2019 was $200. I expect similar amounts most years – we don’t have any wealthy family members that would feel a need/desire to contribute a significant amount.
- We sent $8k to mortgage principal, although we reduced cash position by a similar amount. (Still a good move, given our cash position.)
- T achieved tenure! He also got a raise, though not a huge one, more than usual. My raise was a modest raise, but I should be ready for a promotion this year.
- We traveled to the midwest in February before I returned to work to visit my family.
- My little sister got married and we traveled Las Vegas for the wedding. It was our first “vacation” with the baby, but it was not very vacation-y. The wedding was great, though!
- We traveled to Colorado for a week for work. T played stay-at-hotel-dad while I worked.
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- I finally got to start a new project at work! It is based locally with a really good team. Hooray!
- We traveled to T’s hometown for the holidays and saw his entire immediate family + their SOs/kids, plus many other relatives. LO met her cousins and hung in there with the long travel days, weird/new sleeping arrangements, and 3 hour time change.
2020 Financial Priorities
Max out all tax-deferred space. I’ve been vague on this, but here it is. T and I both have access a 457b and a 403b, which have separate $19.5k limits. T also has tax-deferred pension contributions and some non-voluntary retirement contributions that come out of summer salary (and don’t contribute to the voluntary $19.5k 403b limit). So, we defer a LOT of taxes, and ultimately will shift some from the ~22/24% bracket to a lower bracket (probably). It is amazing, and it is unfair. (That is is one reason I’ve been vague about it – because it is unfair.) This inflates our savings rate, as our pre-tax dollars are worth less than post-tax dollars in a brokerage account. We’ll have a higher income tax burden in retirement, but I’m taking the tax break today while the demands on our income are the highest (mortgage, childcare).
Pay for roof (out of sinking fund). I’ll count the roof in our yearly spending and when calculating our savings rate. The point of noting the sinking fund here is that I intend to reduce our cash savings by roughly the amount of a roof. If we cash-flowed the roof, we wouldn’t be able to afford all other savings goals. I created this sinking fund during the first couple of years after buying our house, because we knew a roof was on the horizon. With this major looming expense out of the way, I feel comfortable reducing our cash position a bit. If the roof costs less than $20k (I hope it does!) we can also consider some other smaller projects.
Max out our 2020 Roth IRAs for $12k (in lieu of college savings). I really want to put the mortgage above this, but I’ll kick myself later for forgoing tax advantaged space.
Pay $20k extra to the mortgage. This is dependent upon our tax refund being approximately what I’m expecting. It is dependent on T having full summer salary (which depends on some childcare issues this summer). It is also dependent on me fixing our tax withholdings, so we don’t overpay throughout the year again.
Spend no more than we did in 2019, excluding the roof. The uncertainty of what a new roof costs was making a savings rate target hard to set. I really want to hit 50% for arbitrary round number reasons. If the roof is free (haha), we could achieve ~55%+.
Reduce spending on Amazon by 50%. This won’t actually save us much money, because I’ll buy the items I need elsewhere. Still, I’d prefer to support other companies (Costco, Target) when the price is similar. Plus, Amazon has gotten much less reliable, and I’m unhappy with how they (don’t) deal with the issue of counterfeits and aren’t responsible for their supply chain. Step one is to figure out what our Amazon total was in 2019. I’m not sure I want to know…
2020 Other Priorities
I used to make a lot of yearly goals, and I’d usually meet most of them. My ambition seems to have waned, and since having LO, keeping her alive and well while juggling work feels like it is enough. (But I can’t totally blame LO, as this trend started before her.)
Finish estate planning. We fell off the radar at the lawyer and shamefully never finished this. Our plan is to do something simpler than what I was initially planning, and leave everything to T. We agree to leave the complexities of protecting LOs claim on things in the case of survivor remarriage after a death to be dealt with by the survivor with a prenup and/or new will/trust. I trust T to arrange things fairly, if the situation arose, and vice versa. It must be set up such that if the survivors dies after remarriage, the trustee of LOs new trust cannot be the new spouse. (I cannot trust any person who is not LO’s parent to appropriately prioritize LO over themselves. Money does strange things, even to mostly decent people.)
Improve meal planning and reduce meat consumption. I’ve been working towards better meal planning and mostly succeeding. We used to eat meat-free meals a lot of the time, but when I was nursing and temporarily dairy-free, more meat focused meals came into the rotation in order to satisfy my hunger. I’d like to move back to less meat, but still filling and healthy. I don’t have a firm goal on this. It is a direction rather than a destination.
Reduce dryer usage and wash more things on cold. This is not a habit, and I really really love the convenience of my dryer…. Still. We don’t really have a lot of space for luandry, and there are several loads each week I wash on hot for either sanitizing reasons or for allergy reasons. We likely need to purchase a new clothes drying rack for this to work.
We don’t have any vacation travel planned, but will visit our family and make some work related trips into mini-vacations. (I’m hoarding vacation days again, in case we decide to have another kid and I need to self-fund another maternity leave.)
That’s all I have for now, and I don’t want to artificially add more things, so I will leave it there.
Happy new year!
