Financial Picture and Investments

[Eagle]

Hi Eagle,

As someone mentioned before, going with a third party can save you a lot on your cellphone bill.

If you need to stay with one of the bigger services, AT&T has the new family value plan which gives you unlimited talk and text plus sharing of 10GB of data for $160 a month for 4 lines.

Wow, thanks so much!

I called AT&T and didn't realize I hadn't cancelled one of the lines my Grandmother used... So I actually had 5 lines (was paying an extra $15 a month for no reason!).

We got the 10GB plan, unlimited minutes and texts at $100 with $15 per phone a month with 4 lines and cancelled the extra 5th one. Our new bill will be about $150 a month with tax. That's a $75 a month savings! Wow thanks so much iliketosavemoney!

[Eagle]

Rebalancing is a tactic to help you buy low and sell high. If one asset class outperforms another, then your asset allocation will shift away the desired balance, so you sell some of the shares that performed well and buy some of the under performing shares to get back to your desired asset allocation.

If this isn't something you want to do periodically, then you can see if your plan offers 'target year' or 'life cycle' funds, that will automatically rebalance and shift your asset allocation based on how many years until you retire.

The expense ratio is how much of the fund they are using to cover their operating costs. If you have $58,200.00 invested with an expense ratio of .67%, then you are paying $390/year in fees. If you invested $58,200.00 in a fund with an expense ratio of .17%, then you would pay $99/year in fees.

Rebalancing the assets in my 401k since I started this thread per your suggestion autoxer. I was only making 2.5% on it. Now it's at about 4.25%. Thanks for the suggestion!

[witchkizzle]

Someone else here might be able to touch on this better, but usually you don't count employer match as part of the percentage of your income that you are saving.

If you are putting away 8% to 401k and 2% to Roth, then you are putting away 10%. A lot of people here and other places suggest this be around 15% minimum. On top of that amount you have your employer match or profit sharing contributions from your employer. If anything, that 4% that your employer is putting in should be thought of as additional income, which would increase your income and then increase the amount you would need to save to get to 15% of income.

I might be mistaken on that. Like I said, if someone else wants to chime in on that I would be interested to hear it.

[Eagle]

Someone else here might be able to touch on this better, but usually you don't count employer match as part of the percentage of your income that you are saving.

If you are putting away 8% to 401k and 2% to Roth, then you are putting away 10%. A lot of people here and other places suggest this be around 15% minimum. On top of that amount you have your employer match or profit sharing contributions from your employer. If anything, that 4% that your employer is putting in should be thought of as additional income, which would increase your income and then increase the amount you would need to save to get to 15% of income.

I might be mistaken on that. Like I said, if someone else wants to chime in on that I would be interested to hear it.

Yup, I contribute 8% to 401k and employer matches 4%. There's also a 3% the company invests on behalf of employees. We also put 2% in a Roth IRA.

Yeah, we'd like to save more but at this point with our budget we believe that's the best we can do. Still we're saving 17% no matter how you look at it.