Okay, adjustments now that I’ve seen a pay stub.
Pretax savings:
Pension: $323
HSA my contribution: $635
HSA employer contribution: $635 (this will max next month at $750 total)
457B: $790**
Total pretax savings: $2383, counting that employer contribution.
After tax so far: $279 student loan payment, but not sure it should count since it all goes to interest. Next month and thereafter this will only be $118.
Total savings so far(if the student loan counts): $2653
Take home pay: less than that.
** I raised this at the first of the year, and it’s a bit of a stretch. We’ll see if we can keep it up. I’ll compare spending in January to take home pay to see if we’re going into the red.
I haven’t seen my husband’s paystubs so I don’t know pretax amounts, but we made roughly $3223.08 in January. This was an extra paycheck month for my husband’s job, so we made more than usual there, but I have more freelance work to do this month so it may even out.
We saved:
Husband’s 401k: $73.53
My tIRA: $110.00 (still contributing to my 2019 IRA)
Emergency fund: $150.00
Also budgeted $272.43 to pay off our credit card. It’s at 0% right now so I am just paying the minimum and keeping the cash in savings for the interest.
Total made: $3223.08
Total saved: $605.96
=18.80%.
Did taxes today. We will be maxing out two tIRAs this year, so there will be another $12k saved. It’s from prior years money, but since I wait to take stock at tax time, that’s true every year, and I’ve got to count it as saved sometime.
Tax refunds and bonuses and 401K matches - you have to add them to your gross income, but you can also count the portion you save towards your savings goal.
So if your income is usually $20,000, but you got a $2,000 tax refund and saved $1000 of it, your savings rate would be
Can I still join? I bet I can scrape up January’s and February’s numbers pretty easily to get caught up and then keep on track. In previous years it might have been easier to do the 20K challenge, but this year it might be too much of a stretch and even 20% might be super fluff or super challenging depending on changes the rest of the year.
All right! Nothing like showing up to the thread fifteen minutes late with Starbucks! I’m going to track gross salary and “other” as income categories and student loan principal, reserve savings, Roth IRA, and work retirement contributions as savings categories. Not counted are emergency fund and sinking fund as those are either totally static or floating around a nebulous minimum. Any “other” income that goes toward sinking fund will not be counted. And right now I don’t have a work retirement match, but if that does return with my new contract in the fall, I won’t count that either.
Please don’t throw me out for my numbers in the first part of the year–there will be some big changes coming in the second part of the year that will affect the average savings rate for the year.
January Savings: 31% 2020 Savings: 31% 2020 Total: $1,369
Quick edit to add in the total $ amount since I want to track that as well. Probably I’ll have a big run up until June-ish, and then that will start to flatten out and won’t clear 20K, but I still want to see how close I can get.
February Savings: 49% 2020 Savings: 42% 2020 Total: $4,738
Four figure tax refunds will not happen every month, though I’m not finished with my state return, so I should see a three figure tax refund in a few weeks yet. It feels a little unfair to calculate savings rate from a windfall with little other purpose than savings for now, but it will help to be accurate in the long run.
