T and I spent 5 nights in Vegas and after not being at work for over a week now I'm really dreading my return tomorrow morning. $930 included 2 round trip plane tickets from PA, 5 nights at the luxor, and a 3-day powerpass for free admission to select exhibits/shows. It was awesome! We also ended up spending another $900 or so when we were there on food/entertainment/souvenirs/gambling. It was all paid for before we ever left the house which made the trip even better!

I'm so antsy since I haven't gotten all of my tax documents to e-file. Last year I had my refund by this time. This is the last year I anticipate a refund, so I'm eager to get that money to throw at our debts. Bank of America please send my info pronto!!!

I posted a similar question for % of income that goes towards mortgage. There were some interesting responses, so I figured I'd ask the same for retirement.

Currently my husband and I have roughly 8.5% going to a combination of pension/401k/403b for retirement. We try to increase contributions by 1% each year. We are in crazy debt payoff mode so I've held off on doing anymore. As soon as T's student loan and my new (used) car is paid off, we're going to open up a Roth IRA.

I still haven't figured out what our retirement goal is. I have a pension so it's difficult to know what my pension will look like in 22 years and I'm having a hard time trying to figure out what my retirement goal is when I'm only 25 years old. I'm currently thinking our goal should be 20% to retirement and then our rental property to supplement. Ask me again in 5 years, I'm sure I'll have a different idea then.

I revised my financial spreadsheet (AKA The Spreadsheet of Life :P) and started listing the % of net income that goes to each and every payment.

Now that my husband and I have refinanced, our 15-year mortgage is 28.7% of our net income (this payment includes homeowners ins. and property taxes). I was just wondering how that compares with all of you? Unfortunately since we're paying on part of our rental property as well, we're paying 6.3% there in addition to 28.7 for our primary home. Hopefully in the future that will be lowered/eliminated.

Hooray! Found a way to track all of my different accounts!

I previously posted about the difficulty dealing with Quicken. I remembered seeing something while doing online banking at BOA's website so I logged back in to take a closer look at it.

In the tab "My Portfolio" you can link all your accounts and view them all within my online banking session with Bank of America. I was able to link everything except my Deferred Comp. I ended up manually entering that information in so now I have a complete view of our finances outside of my google doc spreadsheet. So excited!

Now to tackle the fact that we have a -20k net worth! Stupid rental property and student loans!! I estimate by next year we should be at 0 net worth and then it's onward and upward from there!
BTW, it looks as if the government made some sort of mistake and we will continue receiving the rent check for the rental property! I'll post more later as I find out additional details.

After years of hearing my dad talk about Quicken, I decided to take the plunge today and check it out.

HORRIBLE. It froze on me twice (I've never had this problem with other software I've installed on my laptop) and it turns out not all of my information can even be added. My husbands ING 401k with his company and my Deferred Comp or Pension has no way to connect to Quicken. As far as Quicken is concerned we have no retirement.

Since we just financed a car and refinanced our mortgage I don't even have that information yet to enter into the program (this is not Quicken's fault but still frustrating as I only have a fraction of my financial information at hand).

I think I was better off using my excel file (AKA The Spreadsheet of Life). My husband is laughing at me but I swear, it has everything i need (except for automatic updates, but typing those manually hasn't killed me yet).

Oh well...

I posted in the message boards on Thursday about getting in a car accident that left the volvo not worth salvaging. A towing place came today to pick it up and donate to the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philly.

I was horribly depressed but T kept reminding me that the car was on it's way out anyway. Lately we've been thinking the head gasket was going bad and we had a couple pricey repairs on the way. T and I spent Thursday, Friday, and today looking at cars and settled on a Pontiac. We got the 2007 G6 GT Sedan (in red!) It only has 40k miles on it. This is by far the newest car I've ever owned I'm so excited! The price tag was $9,995 and we decided to finance it. We're planning on paying it off within a year (we took the loan out for longer just in case a baby decides to enter the situation in the next year; it'll be nice to have the option of lower payments). Let me try and see if I can post a picture. It's not ours, but looks exactly like it. Here goes...



Now to start paying this baby off! I'm thinking I focus on T's student loan until that's gone which will free up another $60 dollars a month to put on the car.