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Hey BFC, hoping to get a small bit of advice (hope this is the correct thread). My wife and I are looking to get a better picture at where our money is going each month so we can start saving more in order to buy a house in the next year or two. We are both working full time in our careers, have zero debt/car payments, pay off our cards fully before they're due, contribute to 401(k)s (me) and roth IRAs are maxed yearly (both). I also do auto-transfers for a few things bi-weekly/monthly including various savings (travel account, car stuff, vanguard, etc), which I just increased to go with a slight raise at work. We're doing just fine, but I want us to be doing even better. I guess basically I feel like we make way more money than we're saving and although we do save a lot, could be doing much better and would like the help of some sort of budgeting tool. Is something like YNAB helpful for folks like us? A different bit of budgeting software? YNAB is just a bit intimidating to get started with, so wanted to ask before we fully sat down and tried it out. Let me know if there's a thread better suited for this since the budgeting thread seems dead, and I don't feel like we have enough issues for my own thread. Thanks!
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Aug 16, 2019 12:15
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If you just want expense tracking to begin with, Mint would be worth looking at. Some credit cards also can track your spending and break it into categories. Personally I think YNAB is overkill for what it sounds like you want.
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Aug 16, 2019 12:42
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Iron Lung posted:Hey BFC, hoping to get a small bit of advice (hope this is the correct thread). My wife and I are looking to get a better picture at where our money is going each month so we can start saving more in order to buy a house in the next year or two. We are both working full time in our careers, have zero debt/car payments, pay off our cards fully before they're due, contribute to 401(k)s (me) and roth IRAs are maxed yearly (both). I also do auto-transfers for a few things bi-weekly/monthly including various savings (travel account, car stuff, vanguard, etc), which I just increased to go with a slight raise at work. We're doing just fine, but I want us to be doing even better.
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Aug 16, 2019 13:10
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How much do people typically keep in emergency funds? I.e folks recommend 6 months, how much do folks actually keep on hand? Currently our rent is 2350 a month, I have $22k in emergency savings, and another $16k in cash split between various other accounts that are a mixture of savings and checking accounts. I initially was shooting for around $20k when my rent was $750 cheaper, and now am debating what 6 months looks like. Maybe it’s a common fallacy, but I feel if I lost my job I’d goto ramen right away and curtail a ton of other purchases. Should I shoot for our average spend in a month, a mixture in between? Is there a bell curve where I should targeting? Do folks that have the opportunity save up 12 months? I guess I am partly looking for sanity on how much I should be saving, and then at what point do I start looking at taxable accounts. (I max my 401k, and Roth already) Edit: my rent is the vast majority of our “non-discretionary” bills. We live in the city, the house is energy efficient and there are just the two of us, utilities to plus rent all in are $2600, food is $400 a month? No car or insurance payment besides renters. freeasinbeer fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Aug 16, 2019 |
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Aug 16, 2019 14:57
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I settle for [(rent + average spending) * 6] and leave it at that. So our rent is $1,400, our average spending is around $1,600, so I make sure we have $18k on hand in our savings.
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Aug 16, 2019 15:45
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20k in my e fund (HYSA), maybe another 10k in various checking. Probably need about $3k a month in an emergency (probably could cut down some though).
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Aug 16, 2019 16:07
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Hoodwinker posted:How much does your household gross and how much do you know you're putting into savings? Our take home pay is right around 80k, and auto transfer about $1600 into savings plus $666 (hehe) into vanguard a month. Plus I dump more into savings whenever we have an excess in our checking.
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Aug 16, 2019 16:24
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Iron Lung posted:Our take home pay is right around 80k, and auto transfer about $1600 into savings plus $666 (hehe) into vanguard a month. Plus I dump more into savings whenever we have an excess in our checking.
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Aug 16, 2019 16:29
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Hoodwinker posted:Well you mentioned maxing IRAs and contributing to your 401k. That money counts too. What's your total annual savings amount? I do a fixed percentage for my 401k which varies each paycheck because I’m hourly, so I would need to look for that amount. As for vanguard we have typically just done a lump sum to max it at 11k each year, but I’m doing monthly payments to soften that blow and then we’ll do my wife’s in a lump. So 11k there yearly as well.
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Aug 16, 2019 17:03
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Iron Lung posted:I do a fixed percentage for my 401k which varies each paycheck because I’m hourly, so I would need to look for that amount. As for vanguard we have typically just done a lump sum to max it at 11k each year, but I’m doing monthly payments to soften that blow and then we’ll do my wife’s in a lump. So 11k there yearly as well.  Max for IRA's is $6k/person/year. When you say vanguard what exact account type(s) are you funding?
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Aug 16, 2019 17:27
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Probably just didn't add the extra $500/person when the limit went up.
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Aug 16, 2019 18:13
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100 HOGS AGREE posted:Probably just didn't add the extra $500/person when the limit went up. I initially read it as $22k/yr total, not panicking over the lost $1k. Re-reading post coffee it makes more sense.
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Aug 16, 2019 18:15
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Iron Lung posted:Budget stuff I think YNAB is overkill for you given your current acing habits but you could demo it for a month. Try Mint or Personal Capital. I use PC just to look at monthly cash flow for the same reason.
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Aug 16, 2019 19:08
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Oh yeah sorry, that wasn’t clear. 11k for the two of us, not each! I think the limit just increased this year so we’ll max out again. I guess I just feel like there’s a leak somewhere in our finances, and if we want to more aggressively save I’d like to figure out where it is. 20% on a down payment in Chicago is a pretty steep bill so it’s just been really stressing me out. I guess I could start back up with mint but maybe I’ll check out PC or Clarity instead of ynab.
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Aug 16, 2019 21:43
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Anyone here ever been in a press conference or launch event? I'll be helping out with one on Tuesday. I'm not going to be on stage, but will be fielding questions from the press. Any tips besides "stick to the script"?
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Aug 17, 2019 03:30
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“I don’t know, let me check with my boss” and “I can’t comment on that” are perfectly valid answers, there’s no such thing as off the record and the camera is always on.
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Aug 17, 2019 03:33
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zmcnulty posted:Anyone here ever been in a press conference or launch event? I'll be helping out with one on Tuesday. I'm not going to be on stage, but will be fielding questions from the press. Any tips besides "stick to the script"? I feel like someone recently asked almost this exact same question in one of the threads I read and got some good answers. Maybe the business travel one, or the corporate one, I can’t remember. Maybe someone else remembers and can link the post.
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Aug 17, 2019 05:14
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it was me. and in this thread iirc e: indeed irc https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3616384&userid=174144#post496709865
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Aug 17, 2019 13:24
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I've started tracking my expenses in a pretty DIY manner, which overall works for me but I'd like some more functionality. I have a feeling the answer to this question is probably "learn to spreadsheet" which I'm happy to do if I have to, but thought there might be an off-the-shelf solution. At the moment, I sit down at the end of each week and manually tally up my expenses from my Commonwealth statement (  ) - have a template document with categories and recurring expenses on it already. This isn't too onerous as I don't do a tonne of spending, and I prefer doing it manually as I don't want to give a third party access to my bank login and I prefer being able to use my own judgement to put stuff in categories from the get-go. I'm also finding that knowing I have to manually total it up at the end of the week acts as a subtle discouragement on spending. So having the app automatically tally my spending up is neither necessary nor wanted. Once I'm done with this, I look at the category subtotals and generate a pie chart from this site, which I whack into the document along with a little mini-review/reflection. The numbers vary from my actual bank balance thanks to splitting up monthly/annual expenses on a per-week basis to fit the review timing, but it more or less represents reality in the medium to long term. All in all I'm happy with it for how it works, but I'd like to put the data into some kind of system that will let me expand the functionality a bit, so I can do things like look at spending trends over time, generate quarterly/yearly statemens with graphs, etc. A big reason for this is I have never had a "budget" per-se, just relied on being generally frugal. This has more or less worked as my savings always trend up over time, but now that I see what I spend on dumb, unnecessary stuff, I know I need a pretty hard limit on what I can spend on hobbies and other frivolity for a given year. So, are there any programs/apps with a web interface (mobile only is a dealbreaker) that would allow this sort of functionality, or do I need to learn Google Sheets and find some templates I can modify to suit my needs? Criteria would be:
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Aug 18, 2019 04:33
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American Express HYSA just dropped their interest rate to 1.9%
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Aug 21, 2019 19:15
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ally give me back my gains how dare you
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Aug 21, 2019 19:35
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Bought some 2.00% 4 week treasury notes. That's up 0.10% from the last few weeks, but 8-week ones are still at 1.9%. There is a slight compounded gain there in that they have some tax advantages.
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Aug 21, 2019 19:42
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H110Hawk posted:Bought some 2.00% 4 week treasury notes. That's up 0.10% from the last few weeks, but 8-week ones are still at 1.9%. There is a slight compounded gain there in that they have some tax advantages. I had no idea any of them had such short duration and it seems baffling to me. Is the rate 2% per year, thereby making the gain something like 1/6th of 1%?
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Aug 21, 2019 21:45
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Magnetic North posted:I had no idea any of them had such short duration and it seems baffling to me. Is the rate 2% per year, thereby making the gain something like 1/6th of 1%? Yeah that is the annual rate. Fidelity will even automatically roll them over for you.
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Aug 21, 2019 22:01
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What are the tax advantages of a 8-week bill over a 4-week bill? Or did I read you wrong?
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Aug 21, 2019 23:22
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WithoutTheFezOn posted:What are the tax advantages of a 8-week bill over a 4-week bill? Or did I read you wrong? No, same tax advantages. Fidelity does all of this for free. News and Research -> Fixed Income -> New Issues (login) -> Treasury -> United Stated Treasury Bills Zero Coupon. They're sold weekly, you trade them in even increments of $1000 face value, so to buy $1000 of it you enter "1". Then when it settles out your $998 or whatever is taken and then in 4 weeks they redeem them for you and $1000 is deposited. One silly thing is you must have the full face value in your account to buy them. Pay special attention to the maturity date. Don't oops your way into a 30-year bond. (You can always sell it on the secondary market, but  .)So for example, I have some home improvement ear-marked money I happen to have deposited into Fidelity instead of my usual bank account, so I bought a bunch of CUSIP 912796VW6 today. I sort of half-rear end it and don't auto-roll it so I don't forget and wind up with the money tied up when I need it.
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Aug 22, 2019 00:56
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Lol at the idea of making enough money for an emergency fund. Ideally though you it should be at least 6 months of [rent + spending habits]
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Aug 22, 2019 20:46
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Looks like the great vampire squid is still paying 2.15% though 
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Aug 23, 2019 01:22
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H110Hawk posted:No, same tax advantages. Fidelity does all of this for free. News and Research -> Fixed Income -> New Issues (login) -> Treasury -> United Stated Treasury Bills Zero Coupon. They're sold weekly, you trade them in even increments of $1000 face value, so to buy $1000 of it you enter "1". Then when it settles out your $998 or whatever is taken and then in 4 weeks they redeem them for you and $1000 is deposited. One silly thing is you must have the full face value in your account to buy them.
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Aug 23, 2019 02:34
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Is there a site to check your credit that's actually legit? I'm always worried they're scams even though I don't know how they could actually be scams.
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Aug 23, 2019 09:11
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Thumbtacks posted:Is there a site to check your credit that's actually legit? I'm always worried they're scams even though I don't know how they could actually be scams. https://www.annualcreditreport.com/
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Aug 23, 2019 12:47
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My company offers too many opportunities to save. How should I be prioritizing each one, and are there opportunities I am missing to maximize them without tying up money for too long? I'm thankfully at a place where I've worked myself through the entire personal finance flowchart. a. 401k (100% match up to $5,000) contributing max $19k (self managed, mix of low ER funds) b. HSA, Contribute (7k max) paying for medical expenses out of pocket and saving receipts. c. ESPP (up to 15% of gross pay, taken after tax) 15% discount on up to $10,625 worht of stock every 6 months ESPP is the biggest question mark. My brain is telling me to contribute max, hold for a year (to get LT Cap Gains), then sell and contribute to Roth IRAs and Index funds in my brokerage account. All in I would be saving a total of $47,250/year. That feels unrealistic at my income level. How can I maximize these benefits without tying up as much cash every year?
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Aug 23, 2019 18:55
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I Love Topanga posted:ESPP is the biggest question mark. My brain is telling me to contribute max, hold for a year (to get LT Cap Gains), then sell and contribute to Roth IRAs and Index funds in my brokerage account. You have to pay regular income tax on the 15% discount regardless of how long you hold.
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Aug 23, 2019 19:31
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I Love Topanga posted:My company offers too many opportunities to save. How should I be prioritizing each one, and are there opportunities I am missing to maximize them without tying up money for too long? I'm thankfully at a place where I've worked myself through the entire personal finance flowchart. This is great. I would suggest selling immediately, which reduces your holding period from 1.5 years ($1 month 1 is held for 6 months, bought, then sold a year later) to 6 months max. It means you would pay STCG (ordinary income? The rate is the same) on that instead of LTCG. If you're in the 22 or 24% tax bracket (which odds are you are) then you're looking at a spread of 24-15=9%. Your stocks could easily swing either direction by 9% in a year. Up? Great. Down? Whoops. If you're worried about locking up money for too long, this is where I personally would cut that time short. Don't let our savings rate seem insane. If it works in your budget that's awesome. These are good problems. As for "tying it up too long" - If you put it into a brokerage account then you're tying it up for potentially one recession depending on what you hope to do with the money. If it's just yet more retirement savings, who cares, if it's "I hope to buy a house in 3 years" then you should be doing HYSA or CDs or similar. (FDIC insured products.)
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Aug 23, 2019 20:00
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Eyes Only posted:You have to pay regular income tax on the 15% discount regardless of how long you hold. Understood. H110Hawk posted:This is great. I would suggest selling immediately, which reduces your holding period from 1.5 years ($1 month 1 is held for 6 months, bought, then sold a year later) to 6 months max. It means you would pay STCG (ordinary income? The rate is the same) on that instead of LTCG. If you're in the 22 or 24% tax bracket (which odds are you are) then you're looking at a spread of 24-15=9%. Your stocks could easily swing either direction by 9% in a year. Up? Great. Down? Whoops. If you're worried about locking up money for too long, this is where I personally would cut that time short. As for tying up the cash too long, it's more in regards to annual cash flow. I'd like to maximize the amount of these benefits, but I don't think I can swing saving quite that much every year. I'm banking on everything beyond max 401k (19k) + max ROTH (11k) and now HSA (7k) being gravy. Hopefully those three alone will be sufficient for a semi comfortable retirement. My Target Date funds are currently 2050. Any thing above and beyond I'm hoping will allow me to push that date a little closer.
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Aug 23, 2019 21:59
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holding a lot of stock in the company that employs you is putting more eggs than necessary in one basket: the same layoff could lead to a big interruption in your income and a big drop in your assets. when i had an espp i contributed the most i could afford, sold it immediately, and reinvested in index funds. if you were extremely confident in the rising value of the stock and your salary at the company, maybe the risk would make sense.
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Aug 24, 2019 00:08
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I've never been at a place that offered me stock options, but I'm curious. What if I were at someplace that offered them, but I wasn't optimistic about their future viability as a company, just not enough to be job hunting yet?
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Aug 24, 2019 00:14
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Simpsons Reference posted:I've never been at a place that offered me stock options, but I'm curious. What if I were at someplace that offered them, but I wasn't optimistic about their future viability as a company, just not enough to be job hunting yet? It depends on the plan and your risk tolerance. If you can buy and sell on the same day I would max it out since it's unlikely that you're going to drop 15% in the day or two it takes. Long lockup and you know it's a sinking ship? Well that sounds like Material Non-Public Information and you likely aren't allowed to trade anyways. 
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Aug 24, 2019 01:01
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Simpsons Reference posted:I've never been at a place that offered me stock options, but I'm curious. What if I were at someplace that offered them, but I wasn't optimistic about their future viability as a company, just not enough to be job hunting yet? If it's in a plan that allows you to bail out at any time (cash refund), guarantees the deposits and gives a 15% discount and you can sell immediately........you can't lose whether the stock is going up or down unless it's in absolute free fall on plan maturity. Take the free money.
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Aug 24, 2019 01:02
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I’m generally optimistic about the future of the organization. That being said, I wouldn’t have any more than 5% of my savings portfolio in the company stock at any given time. A drop would be a punch in the stomach but not catastrophic.
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Aug 24, 2019 05:19
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