Evolving Personal Finance » Entries tagged with "401(k)"

We Maxed Out All Our Retirement Accounts for the First Time!

It’s Tax Day for 2021 and our final transfer to Vanguard has gone through, so I can officially announce that Kyle and I maxed out ALL of the tax-advantaged retirement accounts available to us for the first time EVER! We filled up: Kyle’s traditional 401(k)The employee side of my traditional 401(k)The employer side of my traditional 401(k)My Roth IRAKyle’s Roth IRA In recent years, we capped our retirement contributions at 20% of our gross income because we were simultaneously saving for our house down payment. With our house purchase complete, we had no reason to limit our retirement contributions (except, you know, cash flow). We set our goal of maxing out all the traditional accounts available to us in part to keep our AGI low enough to qualify, as best we were able to, … Read entire article »

Filed under: retirement

Hello Again, Four Years Later

Hello Again, Four Years Later

It’s been four years since I posted on this blog, and an amazing amount of life has happened in that time—with the attendant financial changes! In this post, I’m going to catch you up on the highlights. A New Addition to the Family In 2018, we had another baby, DPR2. 90%+ of people who met her remarked that she was an incredibly “chill” baby. Even so, two under 2 (and above 2) require a lot of labor, which is one of … Read entire article »

Filed under: goals

Avoiding an Expensive 401(k) Plan through Self-Employment

Avoiding an Expensive 401(k) Plan through Self-Employment

Kyle finally received the 401(k) plan information from his new employer about 6 weeks after starting work. When he told me the plan offered American funds, my heart sank! The stereotype I have about American funds is that they have loads and high expense ratios. When we looked at the plan documentation, we didn’t find any load disclosures (thankfully), but the expense ratios were approximately an order of magnitude higher than what we have in … Read entire article »

Filed under: retirement, self-employment