berkeley_grad
Confused about dryer sheets
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2008
- Messages
- 2
Hi, all -- I just discovered this forum, and have enjoyed reading the posts. It's wonderful to find such a helpful and friendly community.
I'm a recently married Ph.D. student in the English department at Berkeley. I passed my qualifying exam a few weeks ago, so I finally have some time to think about our financial goals and strategies!
Our goals are pretty simple: we'd like to buy a house sometime within the next few years, and we'd like to grow our money for possible early retirement and eventually to begin giving it away to various causes and charities.
Our current thinking on college funds for our yet-to-be-born children is that we don't want to start them. Either they'll get free tuition at my university, or they should deal with the problem of financing their own education -- with some help from us, of course, but we strongly believe in early financial responsibility and emotional independence. (For those of you who have made a similar decision, I'd be interested to hear about your experiences! This sounds sensible to us in theory, but how does it work out in practice?)
A bit about our financial situation. My wife (who's a legal aid attorney) and I have about $212k in assets. Our retirement funds (two ROTHs, her 401k) are worth about $40k combined, and are all in order (target funds and index funds). Outside of our retirement accounts, an additional $26k is in two index funds, another $100k in Beckman Coulter (from which her father recently retired), and about $50k in cash.
Right now our biggest concern is that we have so much cash just sitting around. Aside from $10k in a high-yield savings account, we'd like to put the rest of it to work in investments. We're also concerned about having so much in a single company's stock.
As for our income, my wife brings in about $45k, and I bring in about $30k in fellowships and part-time jobs. Our only debt is in student loans, of which we have a combined $100k. We're not spendy at all (don't worry -- we still manage to have a lot of fun! Drinks with friends and dinners aren't expensive).
So we'd love to hear your recommendations on how we should allocate our assets, and especially on the best way to save up for a down payment on a house when we know we'll be needing it in 2-3 years. Regarding our asset allocation, we'd like to take pressure off saving $5k each for our annual ROTH contributions by using our other stock holdings to fund those contributions. Does this sound wise?
I would also like to know if anyone has any good recommendations for introductory books in active trading.
Thanks very much! I'm looking forward to your responses.
I'm a recently married Ph.D. student in the English department at Berkeley. I passed my qualifying exam a few weeks ago, so I finally have some time to think about our financial goals and strategies!
Our goals are pretty simple: we'd like to buy a house sometime within the next few years, and we'd like to grow our money for possible early retirement and eventually to begin giving it away to various causes and charities.
Our current thinking on college funds for our yet-to-be-born children is that we don't want to start them. Either they'll get free tuition at my university, or they should deal with the problem of financing their own education -- with some help from us, of course, but we strongly believe in early financial responsibility and emotional independence. (For those of you who have made a similar decision, I'd be interested to hear about your experiences! This sounds sensible to us in theory, but how does it work out in practice?)
A bit about our financial situation. My wife (who's a legal aid attorney) and I have about $212k in assets. Our retirement funds (two ROTHs, her 401k) are worth about $40k combined, and are all in order (target funds and index funds). Outside of our retirement accounts, an additional $26k is in two index funds, another $100k in Beckman Coulter (from which her father recently retired), and about $50k in cash.
Right now our biggest concern is that we have so much cash just sitting around. Aside from $10k in a high-yield savings account, we'd like to put the rest of it to work in investments. We're also concerned about having so much in a single company's stock.
As for our income, my wife brings in about $45k, and I bring in about $30k in fellowships and part-time jobs. Our only debt is in student loans, of which we have a combined $100k. We're not spendy at all (don't worry -- we still manage to have a lot of fun! Drinks with friends and dinners aren't expensive).
So we'd love to hear your recommendations on how we should allocate our assets, and especially on the best way to save up for a down payment on a house when we know we'll be needing it in 2-3 years. Regarding our asset allocation, we'd like to take pressure off saving $5k each for our annual ROTH contributions by using our other stock holdings to fund those contributions. Does this sound wise?
I would also like to know if anyone has any good recommendations for introductory books in active trading.
Thanks very much! I'm looking forward to your responses.