Quote:
Originally Posted by BigVic
I understand that. I guess what I meant to say was would it be better to fund the full $5,000 for last year, or maybe try to save longer and pay my car loan off first? The car is considerably new and the rate(4.99%) is fair, I think. By April I would have around $3,000 for EF after loading the $5,000 into the IRA.
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IRAs have a time table, and there is no time machine to go back and add more in. I would fund 2009 IRA as soon as reasonable, then also fund 2010 as soon as reasonable, then at that point consider car loan or other.
In my first post I mentioned put 15% of gross pay to retirement
then 5% to short term goals (like debt paydown or EF)
follow that- in sequence (retirement comes first). As you pointed out your rate is not that high, and making sure you are secure financially in 10-20-30 years is as important as removing a bill from today's budget.