Every time I am fed up with my job & want to quit, the match & my 5 weeks of vacation stop me from doing it.
Can eyes get as big as salad plates? Also, are you guys hiring ?
Not sure if amelia is currently at a university, but you might want to look there My benefits are basically the same (I get 24 vacation days and 18 sick days, plus paid holidays). It's awesome!
Post by thatgirl2478 on May 30, 2015 22:11:36 GMT -5
Retirement College Travel
Neither of us are huge travel buffs, we know that our kids can borrow for college -- our goal isn't 100% payment but rather as much as we can, and I *think* we're OK for retirement, but you can't borrow for it so that's our #1 priority.
I suppose it's retirement over travel, with hobbies (ie boat) about even with travel. No kids, so no college. And our real estate is somewhat part of our retirement plan.
But TBH, I don't think of it that way. Retirement comes out of my paycheck, so I don't really think about it. It's not included in my budget bc it happens before I see the money. H doesn't have 401k or pension available, so I guess we do have to budget for that, although that's limited by the IRA limit.
We don't have kids yet, but I hope it will stay this way once we do. I want to help my kids with college, but I won't make my own life miserable to be able to afford to pay for 100% of it at any university they want or whatever. We also only have 12 years left on our mortgage (though who knows if we'll stay here), so we should be able to cash flow some college too.
Travel is extremely important to me, and in the right circumstance I would even prioritize it above retirement. Luckily we can do both right now without sacrificing on either front.
I love to travel and hope to do more of it in the future as the kids get older/easier to travel with. Whenever someone posts a "travel bucket list" poll I want to say, "essentially everywhere?" lol. But I'd also really like to pay for their educations or as much as possible (hopefully including grad school as well). It's just such a huge advantage to start out your adult lives with as little debt as possible.
Post by Norticprincess on May 31, 2015 10:16:17 GMT -5
Travel is number one. With both of us having life threatening dx prior to 30 and Having fathers die before normal retirement age. Wakes you up quickly to - No guarantees that 1) we'll make it to retirement 2) be physically able to do what we want.
We were both very well insured prior to dx so if only one makes it - he/she is covered. We don't neglect retirement- we are on target per FA. However, we've prioritized travel over other wants ie much smaller house (mortgage). So the by the numbers more cash is spent on travel. We started retirement savings as soon as we had real jobs with great matching programs.
I plan to retire in about 5 years so my focus right now is putting as much as possible in my TFSA & RRSP's - no travel plans and my current budget includes deposits to my granddaughters education fund and my grandsons disability fund.
I plan to retire in about 5 years so my focus right now is putting as much as possible in my TFSA & RRSP's - no travel plans and my current budget includes deposits to my granddaughters education fund and my grandsons disability fund.
That makes sense. Do you plan to travel much in retirement?
Not much. My grandson has special needs and my son & DIL have asked me to move closer to help with the kids, hopefully I stay healthy enough
Which is to say that we're saving enough to cover 95% of private college tuition, but by the 15-20% of gross rule, we are not saving enough for retirement. But the calculator says we're fine.
SCRU alert, The biggest thing my parents ever did for me was save enough that I could go to school wherever I wanted with no loans. If I'm at all capable of it, I want to pay that forward.
Post by fortnightlily on May 31, 2015 17:44:57 GMT -5
Retirement first. Travel and college are probably tied, with travel edging out. Though our ability to contribute much to either will depend heavily on whether we are OAD or not. Right now my parents are contributing some to college, as well.
I also naively have hopes that something will be done about the outrageous costs of higher ed before DS (20 months) gets there.
Post by spankswife on May 31, 2015 19:12:50 GMT -5
Retirement first.
We don't save for college bc we send DD to private school. I look at is paying for school for 18 years instead of 14. We would pay for in state and help with out of state. Not sure if we would cover full out of state tuition. However when DS starts school, tuition combined will cost more than we save for retirement.
Travel is third place. We've in FL so we take advantage of local trips, Caribbean, Disney. We do more budget/family friendly trips as well, for now.
We are on a 5 year plan for a new, bigger house too, somewhere in that mix.
Post by hurricanedrunk on May 31, 2015 19:31:07 GMT -5
Retirement comes first.
Followed closely by travel. We try to do a big international trip every other year and smaller US and in state trips in between.
College- No kids but either way this would come third. We're headed down the child free path but I would struggle with putting $$ towards this vrs travel since my parents paying for college helped me get a solid financial start. I would want to carry that on.
Post by wanderlustmom on May 31, 2015 20:28:13 GMT -5
Retirement first, we are ahead on this since DH started saving in college. Travel is second, we take a two week international trip each year with the four of us (miles help a lot). College is third but we are not scrus so we have to save. It's part of the reason we are hoping kids pick state schools and we aren't upgrading our house. We switched to a 15 year and really hope each child can graduate debt free.
Which is to say that we're saving enough to cover 95% of private college tuition, but by the 15-20% of gross rule, we are not saving enough for retirement. But the calculator says we're fine.
SCRU alert, The biggest thing my parents ever did for me was save enough that I could go to school wherever I wanted with no loans. If I'm at all capable of it, I want to pay that forward.
Will you guys have more children?
I am being so nosy in this thread lol.
The plan is for one more. At my last job, saving for two would have been a pinch. The new job comes with enough RSUs that it shouldn't. It helps a lot that the public schools here are good, though for high school with the current boundaries we'll face a "private school vs extracurriculars vs move" decision.
Part of retirement planning is keeping in mind that we want to travel. We do take vacations and plan to do more as the kids get older, but the vacations will always be after the college funding for the year is complete. DH and I both graduated with a lot of debt. We are not trying to pay for the kids' college expenses 100%, but we are trying to make it a little easier for them to get started after graduation.
This conversation has been coming up over and over in my real life lately. Apparently if you prioritize your own retirement over saving for your kids college, you are some kind of selfish maniac in my circle of friends.
Right now we are child free but would consider having kids in the future. Our priorities currently are: Retirement Travel College
The bottom 2 would switch if we had a kid. One of my friends said to me, "You really need to just work a few extra years and pay for your kid's college." We are planning on working until we are 65. I paid for my college and so did DH so we just aren't of the mindset that every child is entitled to a fully funded college experience. There's also just the reality that while paying back my student loans and funding my retirement, I need to also pay for my kids college? If I have the means, that's one thing. If we don't... we don't.
-Retirement -Travel -Home renovations and expenses*
*I don't have kids, so this stuff kind of replaces college savings for us, at least for now. We are still on the fence as to whether we will have kids or not. If we do, I would prefer to cover as much of college as possible. I don't know that I would plan on saving much out of our monthly budget once a kid arrived, though. I think we currently have enough in non-retirement savings that we could cover at least one college education without saving much extra, if we decided to divert those funds that way.
This is a great post! Generally, we're in this order in terms of dollars or even percentage of income: Retirement first, then travel (or just vacations in general), and lastly college. We have 2 kids, so outlining it like that actually makes me feel guilty!
We are also in the retirement, then travel, then college.
We recently bumped up our retirement to 18% (including match). We are thinking about moving it to 20% soon.
We don’t set have a set budget for travel. We just cashflow vacations. We would actually like to travel even more than we do, but time off from work is the limiting factor.
We do want to fully pay for in-state public school. So we do contribute to 529 also. I know a lot of financial experts recommend maxing out all retirement before considering a 529, but we have chosen to ignore that advice. Mainly because retirement balances are on track for our ages.