Posted by Forest on October 3, 2008
I added $250 to my Roth IRA during the month of September which leaves me just $200 shy of hitting the maximum allowed for a year which is $5,000. It will be nice to be able to spread that remaining $200 out over the next three months and I’m absolutely positive that I will be able to accomplish this goal. I will probably just put $200 in during October and then not have to worry about it at all during December when I’ll have other money issues to focus on such as holiday shopping.
There is still a tiny part of me that thinks I might be crazy for pumping my cash into the IRA which is down 21% from when I started it last year, but I have to just keep telling myself that hopefully I’m buying on sale, the market will recover and that I’m not going to need this money for a very long time.
Anyways, I’m still pretty excited to be so near the finish line for the one and only goal I have highlighted in the sidebar (which is now updated). Next year (or sooner) I will add a few more financial goals to be tracked on this blog.
Posted by Forest on September 29, 2008
I, like most people in the market, lost a lot of money today. Of course, I’m only talking about percentage-wise. Fortunately, I’m relatively young and don’t have much money, so even though I lost a fairly large percentage today it wasn’t actually all that large of an amount. But still, it hurts.
On any given day, I don’t actually spend too much time worrying about the state of the economy. However, these days, it’s hard to avoid. The news is everywhere and it has a lot of people wondering what to do. I’ve read a few posts from bloggers that are thinking about adding to their positions because “Buy Low” is something you hear often and low is definitely where we’re at. They reason that in the long term, the markets should rise again and all will be well in time. I agree with that logic, but I have not quite made up my mind whether or not I am going to increase any of my standard investments at this point in time.
Posted by Forest on September 2, 2008
After all the accounting was done for August, there was some money leftover in my checking account. I’ve added another hundred dollars to the Roth IRA and my goal of maxing it out at $5,000 for the year is getting tantalizingly close.
Posted by Forest on August 12, 2008
After I ran my July numbers, I found some extra money lying around and used it to add $500 to my Roth IRA which brings my total contributions for the year to $4,300! I’ve updated the graph in my sidebar to reflect the changes. Now, I only have $700 to go before I hit the $5,000 limit. Once it is fully funded, I will either increase contributions to my emergency fund, to the Vanguard Investing fund or perhaps pay a little extra to my student loan.
Posted by Forest on July 15, 2008
So last Friday when I collected my paycheck, I noticed it was about 100 dollars short from normal. According to the stub, that money was allocated to the ESPP. I’m annoyed because I specifically opted out of the program, but I guess I must not have done it in enough time. What’s also annoying is now my opt-out will probably go into effect and the account will just sit there with 100 dollars in it and no more will be contributed. I never got any paperwork on the ESPP either, so I don’t even know how to access my account. I’m sure I could look into it a bit more online, but I’ve been too busy and it’s not a top priority. When I do get around to looking into it, I hope to be able to withdraw the money before it gets put towards buying the stock.
Posted by Forest on July 9, 2008
Almost as soon as I opted into the ESPP at work, I’ve opted out. Mostly because I don’t plan on being with the company for too much longer. Plus, the stock program was going to require me to open a new account at yet another brokerage and I’m already sick of dealing with the high number of accounts I have spread around the internet. And on top of all that, the stock market is sick right now, especially my company’s stock and I just don’t want to get involved with that if it’s not going to be for the long term and right now, I don’t want anything to do with this company long term. So I opted out of the program before I even contributed a penny and I feel really good about the decision.
Posted by Forest on June 24, 2008
I haven’t talked much about investing yet, but I plan on writing a few posts about my investing experiences in the future. For now, I just wanted to note that I signed up for my company’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan today. I’ve chosen to allocate 5% of my net pay per paycheck to buying the company stock, but the cool thing is that I get to buy it at a 15% discount to the market price. So in a way it’s like I get an instant 15% return on my money, as long as the stock stays the same or goes up! But even if the stock goes down a little bit, my investing outlook is for the long term, so I’m not too worried.
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