Catching up

Let’s see…where were we now? Well, it has been quite some time since I’ve last posted (May). At that time I had just made a job change, bought a high-deductible health plan and fully funded a Health Savings Account. Since then things have pretty much been on auto pilot while I have been busy with my new job and some other matters than needed my attention. During that time I’ve been pretty much doing the bare minimum - making sure to pay the bills on time, continue to watch our spending habits (though a bit less closely than in the past) and to funnel excess funds to our account at EmigrantDirect.

Now I feel that things are starting to settle back down I should have more time to dedicate to the blog, so to quickly get back up to speed before we move forward, here is a quick rundown of the more important events that have transpired since May:

• As soon as it was possible, I rolled my Simple IRA account from my previous workplace to a Traditional IRA account held with Vanguard in which all money is still invested into Vanguard’s Target Retirement 2045 (VTIVX).


• We were able to make the maximum allowable contributions to our Roth IRAs and the wife's 401k as expected. In addition, we were able to make the maximum allowable contribution to the husband's HSA.


• We had plans to pay down the second mortgage debt with the help of a no-fee, 0% balance transfer offer, but never moved on paying the debt after receiving the balance transfer check (I’ll get into the reasons why later on). We got so far as to deposit the funds and transfer the amount to our account with EmigrantDirect where it sat accruing interest while we made the necessary minimum payments on the credit card debt. In December we paid the outstanding amount on the credit card since the 0% offer was to expire in January.


• We paid down the balance on the American Express Blue which was the remaining balance of a personal loan we paid down back in March 2005. There was really no rush to pay this off since the interest rate was 2.99% for life, but I missed paying on time in April (by a day), so I had to quickly pay the remainder of the balance to avoid additional interest charges. That was a rather careless oversight on my part, but at least it’s one less thing to worry about going forward.


• We paid property taxes last month which totaled $3,517.32 (last year we paid $3,869.48) and made an additional mortgage payment in December to get the additional tax deduction as we had done last year.


• For the first time, we were able to immediately make the maximum contributions ($5,000 each) to our Roth IRAs on January 2 due to the large amount of cash that had accumulated in our EmigrantDirect account.

I believe that covers much of the bigger stuff. Next I’ll be updating our balance sheet and the about us sections. Afterward I’ll review our financial goals for 2007 and put together what we hope to accomplish in 2008.