The other day I was looking at my goals over on the sidebar and I noticed I was seriously behind on my Roth IRA contributions. Earlier in the year the plan had been to make a steady monthly contribution until I hit the max of $5,000 in December.
However, it didn’t really work out like that. I got busy putting money in the wedding fund and then the honeymoon fund, and well, my retirement didn’t seem quite as immediate of a need. It also didn’t help that contributing to my Roth last year was the same as pouring money into a bottomless pit. I think I was down about 55% at the peak. But now that the market has been going back up (though I’m not convinced it’s going to stay up), I’m willing to throw some more money at it. It also helps that the wedding and honeymoon funds are full (though about to be emptied). So yesterday I browsed through a bunch of my accounts and managed to scrape together some money for a contribution.
This morning I logged into Fidelity and contributed $750 to my Roth IRA which is all a target date range fund or whatever they’re called. That puts me at $2,000 in contributions for the year and I still hope to max it out eventually! I currently have $9,225 in the Roth IRA with an overall return of -16%. Not too bad considering.
How about you? Do you make your contributions systematically or haphazardly?
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Depends on what kind of account I’m contributing to.
Mutual fund accounts, I contribute regularly.
Brokerage accounts I contribute haphazardly, so transaction fees don’t eat up my meager funds.
very systematic — I have it set up to direct deposit a fixed amount each paycheck into my cash account, which is auto invested once a month!