Four weeks of attendinghood are in the books. I really like my new practice and the people I’ll be working with, and I’m hopeful that this is the start of a beautiful relationship.
Budget/Cash Flow
I’ve tweaked this a little bit, for two purposes. First, I’m trying to get a little more granular with my spending, and have fewer things go into the ‘Miscellaneous’ category. This will likely be work in progress, maybe with addition of one or two more spending categories as a notice more trends. Second – and more importantly – I’m pulling out payments toward non-revolving accounts (i.e. cars and student loans) and combining them with investing and savings to get a ‘wealth building rate’.
My goal is for 2/3 of my net income to go toward wealth building. This leaves 1/3 for housing, food, and all other discretionary and non-discretionary spending. With very rough back-of-the-envelope calculations, that’s about $79,000 in spending and $158,000 in wealth building per year (or $6,580 and $13,160 per month, respectively). That gives us the same effective ‘take home pay’ of a couple making about $110,000 per year pre-tax, a very comfortable upper middle class lifestyle.
Sort of burying the lede here, but how bout that ‘money in’ column. And that’s with only one bi-weekly paycheck. Good things are happening in the PayItBack household. For the purposes of these charts, I’ll be including my 403b contributions as income (because after all it is!).
Net Worth
Not much movement here yet, still smarting from the damage we did to ourselves with the move to a bigger home and a month without pay. Also doesn’t help that the market has been what it has, but that’s out of my hands. I’ll be happy to see the debts column back under a quarter million, I know that much.
Wealth Building Goals for 2019
1) Max out 403b: $2,192 of $19,000 (11.5% done)
2) Max out backdoor Roth IRAs: $2,000 of $12,000 (16.7% done)
3) Max out 529s for state tax benefit: $200 of $8,000 (2.5% done)
4) Pay off personal family loan: $0 of $6,060 (0.0% done)
5) Build up emergency fund (checking and savings) of $30,000 (35.1% done)
6) Put whatever is left toward paying off my car loan at 3.99%