YOU GUYS. I just don’t know what to say here. At the current moment we are not planning exotically interesting things financially. More stay the course.
As always we’ll contribute 10 – 11% of our income to our 401(k)s. We’ll plan to save another 10% of our post-tax income in cash and investments. Something that helps us with this strategy is that we do not spend our raises. Thus, we can increase our budget when we need to due to cost of living increases, but we still have some extra cushion.
What do we have planned?
We’ll max out a Dependent Care FSA. We have never had one of these before! It won’t fully cover this year’s daycare bill but it WILL lower our taxable income. WIN!
Continue to max out our HSA. Contribute to Section 529 plans for both children. Contribute to our 401(k)s and Roth IRA. Boring dot com. Planning on our future selves thanking our past selves for this.
Last year we maxed out our HSA and we spent all but $400 of it paying for Glitter’s birth and meeting our max out of pocket (party!). We’re hopeful we might be able to keep a little more cash in the HSA this year and actually invest it.
We’re planning for some (bigger) house purchases. We’ll be replacing both garage doors and openers this spring. It simply needs to be done. Our water softener has died (RIP) so we’re having a new one installed Friday. We also have saved to purchase a kitchen table (when we find it). I would like to (myself) paint our master bathroom. An entertainment center for the family room is on the way (and a new rug and lamp arrived earlier this month). All of these expenses are covered by the moving budget that we allocated last year – we didn’t spend all of the money in July when we moved because we knew it would take time to settle in and see what we needed.
Stay off cable TV.
We didn’t set up cable when we moved into our house and we plan to keep it this way. Instead we are using a combination of: an antenna (free TV from the air!!!), Sling, and Netflix. This combination allows us to watch all of the shows we love and thanks to Sling’s setup, we can watch TV when we want, not just live!