Evolving Personal Finance » Entries tagged with "Roth IRA"
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
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
Where’s the Tipping Point Between a Roth and Traditional IRA?
I love my Roth IRA (and my Roth 401(k)). Throughout my twenties, I didn’t have access to a workplace-based retirement account, so the IRA was a retirement-life-saver. I also was not making much money as a grad student, so using a Roth made total sense. When I speak to current grad students, I advocate using a Roth IRA for retirement savings. But at some point, doesn’t a traditional IRA or 401(k) start to make more … Read entire article »
Filed under: retirement, taxes
DECREASE IN PAY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I received an email last week that gave me a bit of a scare! The subject line included my name and “Pay Decrease.” When I opened the email, the attachment was titled “DECREASE IN PAY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT.” I kind of freaked out until I read the body of the email, but even after that reassurance I was pissed at the manner they let me know about this change! Even my advisor agreed that it was “unfortunately … Read entire article »
Filed under: grad school, income
Reaching Our First Retirement Savings Milestone
Kyle and I are both celebrating our 28th birthdays this July. We’ve been flirting with having one year’s income in our Roth IRAs and after the big upswing in the stock market last week I decided to take a closer look to determine if we had finally passed that one year mark. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful birthday present to ourselves? The one-year’s-income-in-retirement-accounts milestone isn’t some objectively big accomplishment. If you poke around the web for … Read entire article »
Filed under: retirement
My Sister’s Awesome Financial Decisions
I don’t talk about my family of origin a lot on this blog (for privacy reasons) but I want to suspend that policy for today’s post to brag about my sister. My sister is 25 and not a nerd. Like, I’m a nerd, right? I went to a nerd high school and a nerd college and now I’m doing a PhD in engineering and I picked up an interest in PF along the way, which … Read entire article »
Filed under: college, debt, family, goals, investing, retirement, savings, stock market
Contributing to Last Year’s Roth IRA
Kyle and I have deviated from our normal Roth IRA contribution setup. Our normal routine is to each make bimonthly contributions (working out to about once per week between the two of us) to our Roth IRAs and make additional contributions when we receive extra paychecks. Despite my intense desire to max out both our Roth IRAs, we were several hundred dollars short of maxing out our 2012 contribution at year’s end. In previous years … Read entire article »
Filed under: retirement
Organic Search Terms
EPF’s organic search traffic has really spiked up in the past couple weeks – well, at least in comparison with what it used to be! Just last week I started looking at the search terms leading people to EPF (people, not bots). Today I’d like to take a look at a few of the search phrases. Post with the Most By far my most popular post in terms of being found by the wider internet is the … Read entire article »
Filed under: blogging, grad school, retirement
Earned Income: The Bane of the Graduate Student’s Roth IRA
This is my contribution to The Roth IRA Movement started by Jeff Rose at Good Financial Cents. The post will briefly touch on the advantages of the Roth IRA account but will focus on how graduate students can determine whether or not they have earned income (now: taxable compensation). For more posts with greater detail on various aspects of the Roth IRA, please visit the Movement’s page. Also, I am not a CPA or financial … Read entire article »
Filed under: grad school, retirement
Why You Should Save for Retirement While In Graduate School Part 2
aka Why You Should Save For Retirement Even with a Low Income This is the second half of a two-part post intended to inspire graduate students and others with low incomes who are currently not saving for retirement to start. Check out the first post for my assumptions and an argument concerning compound interest. Please remember that I am not a financial planner or CPA and you should not consider my opinions financial advice targeted for … Read entire article »
Filed under: choices, retirement, savings
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