Making Me a Millionaire

Goals for 2010

I’m very happy with the way we managed our finances towards the second half of 2009.  We curbed our spending and made sure we weren’t being reckless with our money and as a result, we managed to accumulate a good chunk in our emergency fund.

In 2010, we will be selling our house and moving to a new city.  We booked our tickets to Seattle for January 14 so hopefully that will help us in making our decision on where to move to.  With all these big changes, its a bit more difficult to have aggressive goals but I will still list some that I plan on aiming for this year.

1) Max out the Roth IRA for 2009. Since we still have until April 2010 to put money into our Roth IRA, I plan on maxing both our accounts out.  The Roth IRA is one of the best retirement vehicles and I plan on taking full advantage of it while we still can.

2) Put away $50K into our down payment fund. 50K sounds like a lot to be able to put away, but we’re lucky that my husband still has 5 months of his severance left!  We plan on putting away his entire severance and continue living our lives like we normally do (ok maybe with a little more spluring than usual).  We want to buy a home soon and we all know how insanely expensive west coast home prices are.  We probably don’t want to carry more than a 300K mortgage so that means we’d have to put down at least 200K.

3) Invest more in stocks. In 2009, we focused mostly on mutual funds and not enough on stocks.  This year, I plan on evening it out and investing in both stocks and mutual funds and try to do dollar cost averaging.  I also want to learn a little more about ETFs.

4) Spend less on food. This past year, we spent over $16K on dining out alone!  It’s carelessness and gluttony at its best.  I’m not proud of it.  I hope to cut this in half for this year by cooking more at home and being more mindful and aware of what we’re ordering and what kind of restaurants we are going to.  I’ve also wasted groceries on many occasions when we had food at home but we chose to dine out and ended up throwing out the food later on.  My new goal is to eliminate excess and waste!

5) Give more. My husband and I have a foundation set up with Vanguard.  The purpose of this foundation is to one day either set up a school for underprivileged kids or to offer scholarships to students who cannot afford college.  I would like to contribute $10,000 to the foundation this year.

6) eBay. With the big move happening this year, this is a great opportunity for us to sell some of our furniture or clutter on eBay.

7) Prepare for a baby! Ideally, we’d like to start having kids soon and with each pregnancy/delivery costing around $20K we need to start preparing.  I don’t want to actually set aside the money for a baby but I want to be aware of the costs and prepare accordingly by putting some money away and being smart with our spending habits.

It will be fun to look back on this entry and see how many of these goals were met.  I hope we succeed in achieving our goals and I have great hopes for 2010!

An Act of Charity

We’re back from New Orleans!  Had a great time there although we ran into a few storms which made it difficult to walk around.  I’m glad to be back home though and to start the research/planning process of our move.  My husband started work today but we’re not sure exactly when he’ll officially be on the road.  Once he starts traveling, we’ll make a trip to Seattle (which takes the top spot in places we are considering to move to).  When it comes to places with no state income tax, Seattle is really the only one on the list that we are both willing to move to.  Las Vegas comes in second but I don’t find it to be a family friendly place.  Ideally, we’d love to move to California but I think we’ll wait a few years for that because if we moved now, we probably wouldn’t be able to afford a very nice place to live in there.

So back to New Orleans.  We went with a group of friends which made the trip lots of fun.  But it was heartbreaking to see such poverty everywhere.  We also went to the lower ninth ward which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina and it was really an experience of a lifetime.  I recommend stopping by there to anyone who visits the New Orleans area.  It’s incredibly sad but it brings you closer to the event and allows you to see how terrible the destruction was.  It’s been 4 years and the area still has not been rebuilt.  Homelessness was everywhere and it made us wonder how many of the homeless were victims of the hurricane.

We went out for lunch on our last day and decided to pack all our leftovers into a box and offer it to the next person we saw who could use a good meal.  Just seeing the look on the man’s face when our friend handed him the box and how he immediately began eating ravenously was one of the greatest feelings.  It felt so good to know we weren’t wasting food by leaving it at the restaurant and that we were offering food to someone who was hungry.  I encourage all of you to consider doing something like this the next time you are at a restaurant and haven’t finished your meal.  There are plenty of people out there who would love to finish it for you!

The only thing that disturbed me was the fact that we had to use a styrofoam box for the food.  I doubt it got recycled.  I’m going to have to start carrying biodegradable boxes or something!

Before I sign off, I’d like to share a photo I took of steps leading to where there once was a house.  It was a heartbreaking image for me.