December 25, 2017
Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, Happy nearly end of the year to everyone else!
I’m feeling pretty good about all the work I’ve put into getting our money wrapped up in 2017 and ready for 2018.
This series has been monumentally helpful to keeping me on track because my other constant feeling is being on edge with our current administration. Politics aside, the people we have in office are utterly abhorrent human beings who only believe women exist in a binary state of “would have sex with her / wouldn’t have sex with her” and it’s appalling. Then there’s all the egregiousness of Naziism and white supremacy gaining a public facing foothold, revelations of abuse of women and children over the years … it’s way too much for …
Wait. I was talking about money, wasn’t I? Sorry, got a bit off track there. Oh right, that’s because I started thinking about the tax code and all of THOSE implications. Right, back to my original train of thought here:
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December 18, 2017
Last month, I had a brief conversation with our tax person to run some numbers for our 2017 taxes, but we didn’t come up with much more we could do to become more tax efficient other than more charitable giving. Then along came Nicole and Maggie with a reminder that I hadn’t considered bunching our property taxes and I’m so glad they did.
If we don’t bunch them, our 2017 property taxes will be $8,500, $10,780 in 2018, and $10,420 in 2019.
If we do bunch them, they will be $14,020 in 2017, $5,210 in 2018, and $15,630 in 2019.
Our other relevant assumptions:
1. Expected mortgage interest for 2017: $19,865.43, approx expected morgage interest for 2018: $26,506.08
2. Drop Dad from list of dependents starting 2017
3. Drop Brother from list of dependents starting 2018
4. My W-2 income will probably be static for another year since I got a raise this year, PiC’s will probably go up about 3-5%. Stupid small companies *grouse* (more…)
December 11, 2017
The second (missing) IRA
It’s a touch mortifying to admit that until now, I have failed utterly to start contributing to PiC’s IRA – we started to get on that, and …. I dropped the ball. I got distracted!
Plus I let myself get hung up on where his money should go. His work uses Fidelity but I use Vanguard and we all know I’m right! But for some reason, that argument holds no sway with his company. Philistines.
He had a teeny IRA somewhere long ago that we rolled over into a money market account until we had time to make a decision. Er, until I had a time to make a decision. (more…)
November 29, 2017
I knew this would be a multi-step process but who knew it’d require a Trello board of its own. I’m assuming there will be more updates after this.
My first step was to tell Dad that the support has to stop. I legitimately tried to call and speak to him like a decent human but when he didn’t pick up, I took that as a sign to just leave him a message and emotionally shift the burden. That night, I also emailed to make sure that if the voicemail wasn’t heard for some reason, he had the email, I know he checks that.
He didn’t respond for a day but I wasn’t waiting around for a confirmation.
On to step two, realizing that the move has turned our lives upside down and this was collateral damage – I can’t find my car title anywhere. ARGH. After several fruitless searches, and annoyingly finding a digital copy of the title but not the physical copy, I sent off to the DMV for a duplicate title. Waiting for it is torture but it’s given me time to strategize. (That thing is going to turn up when the duplicate arrives, I just know it.)
Third step, stop making the same mistakes. (more…)
November 27, 2017
Today’s money fun: mortgage recasting!
I caught a tidbit about this tool a while back on my usual rounds of interesting PF blogs, and filed it away for future use. Someone somewhere said that “no knowledge is ever wasted”. While that might not be true of everything tucked up in my grey matter, like the Thundercats theme song, this one was exactly what we needed.
You may recall our monster mortgage. You may recall my stress about said monster mortgage. You may recall that I was nearly obsessive about eliminating our mortgage as fast as possible even before it turned into Godzilla because I hate debt and I hate that our monthly obligations skyrocketed with this move.
I had a plan.
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November 20, 2017
Mimicking my favorite tax blogger Kay Bell’s “Moves to make” posts, I’m making some moves before the end of the year to maximize our tax efficiency, minimize our expenses, and ensure we’re saving / investing as much as we can for retirement.
Step One – examining Vanguard accounts!
My Rollover IRA has held my retirement contributions since 2007, and my personal rate of return over that time has been 10.4%, but the fund selections are really outdated.
Over the past decade, as my contributions grew, I’ve shifted from holding Investor Shares to Admiral Shares which have a much lower expense ratio but that was only true for two of my five funds:
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November 15, 2017
I’m not normally a big fan of BF. I’ve not been out in the early hours of the morning since I last humored my woollyheaded friends who really really wanted to go to Best Buy and the mall over ten years back – I went along to keep the boys company and hang out.
These days I only shop online but I hear tell that this year, online sales will outpace sales at physical brick and mortar locations so with some good luck, the sales get better accordingly. I’m sharing my list here
- iPhone charging cable, preferably 6 ft. My Amazon Basics cord has been abused terribly and is about to snap in two. Can’t decide if this is due to user error or poor materials but I’m willing to take the blame.
- iPhone for PiC with as much memory as can be crammed into a hand computer. His hand me down phone is dying a slow and painful death. Mostly painful for me, the Home IT person on call.
- 8 TB external hard drive. I missed that Amazon sale during FinCon where it was running about $130 but I also didn’t have a chance to do some research on which one is compatible with both PCs and Macs since we use both.
- Fireproof safe.
- Portable generator. I’ve got my eye on one that’s about $1000, I suspect they won’t be having a sale on them but it’s worth checking just in case. If no sale, we’ll keep on waiting because I’m working on cash flow recovery.
- Husky Universal SAE and Metric Mechanics Tool Set, 60-Piece set
- (Only a want) Purely if there’s another $25 sale or the like: a new Kindle. Mine has been dead for over a year now.
- Edit to add: blank address labels! I print our own address labels to spare my hands and save on costs. Maybe Staples?
:: Are you watching the sales for anything particular? Have you seen any great deals on any of this stuff?