It seems like exact numbers are a moving target, so you just have to pick something that looks good and start going for it.
Until we sell the condo, all I can do is plan. But it's nice to think about starting to boost retirement savings once things have loosened up. And if we can refi our duplex mortgage, that should loosen things up even further.
Based on the 8x rule and our current salaries (and AS's estimated income), I came up with a potential goal:
$486,000 in retirement assets by 2019.
Since we only have $230K now, we'd need $256K more in 4 years. That's $64K per year or $5300 per month. A long shot for sure, but better to shoot for that and fall short than just try to hit what we think we can.
We currently put 7.5% of my income away (including match), and 6% of NT's if I count his match, for a total of $8325 per year, $694 per month.
Once we sell the condo we'll be putting 10% of AS's away. So my estimate for all of that is $1176 per month, or $14,116 per year.
We'll also start contributing to Roths again. We used to do $450 per month but I'm thinking we should all max out our Roth's, so that's $1375 per month. I think we can manage that. That would take us to contributing $2551 per month, or $30,616 per year.
Then I'm thinking NT and I can bump up our 401(k)s to make it a nice even 10% each that we're putting away. That would add $327 per month or $3925 more per year, and would take us to $2878 per month, or $34,541.
It's not all the way to $5K a month, but it's getting there. And hopefully our investments would start to grow faster as we had more and more in our accounts. Of course, with all of this happening incrementally, we wouldn't actually get anywhere close to the first year goal, but that's OK.
We could probably achieve all of this and still have money left over for debt repayment, fun and renovations. So that seems like a good first set of goals to work on. If we can actually achieve all of these this year, then I can look and see if more aggressive saving is feasible or not.
But first, we play the waiting game some more...
Sketching beginnings of a retirement challenge
February 4th, 2015 at 10:01 pm
February 4th, 2015 at 10:34 pm 1423089259
February 5th, 2015 at 12:55 am 1423097705
February 5th, 2015 at 01:15 am 1423098935
BINGO! How exciting that you are at a place financially where you can start trying to wrap your brain around retirement numbers!
February 5th, 2015 at 01:39 am 1423100397