hola amigos

[bright eyed]

hello everyone,

just thought i would say hello and thanks for all the generous and interesting advice! I came here seeking help for my friend and I am definitely winning out with help for myself and family .

i definitely have a lot of reading (books, archives here!) to do, but feel good about our commitment to do our best with our finances.

Neither my DH nor I come from any money, our parents are hard working class immigrants (well, mine are more middle class(highly in debt) hard working) and we are second generation kids trying to take the next step for our kids .

I'm 30 and DH is 37, we have 3 kids - 16 year old (my stepson, i wasn't that fun in high school), baby and preschooler. Aaand we live in california, so RE for me looks like 66.5 versus 67.5! aaand i work in nonprofit!

FIRE is definitely something we would LOVE and hope to achieve, but those darn lottery tickets keep failing us so we'll have to try something else.

i figure i better surround myself with savers then spenders, so i'm turning off the ebay/amazon and turning on this forum!

 

[yakers]

Welcome. Although the pay at most non profits is not great some of them do have good retirement plans, how is yours?

Yakers, southern cal fellow, wife retired in 06 and I expect to soon follow....

 

[Helen]

Hola !

Do you have a plan yet in place to get you to FIRE ? What books have you read so far ?

There is a ton of information out there. After reading and studying and surfing I've decided to keep it as simple as possible.

I also put together a spreadsheet of retirement savings by accounts and by the year. If I stay on track I should be able to bail from the workforce at age 56. The spreadsheet is my road map and it keeps me from having to reinvent the wheel each year.

Best of luck,

-helen

 

[bright eyed]

oooh i 'm just beginning to try to understand. only thing i have done so far is increase my retirement 403b every time i get a bonus or raise, so i started off contributing $25 a paycheck (every 2 weeks) 6 years ago, and now i put in $350 a paycheck . but aim to max out in the next year or so.

i need to read a lot more, i only have investing for dummies and have only thumbed through a few sections. i have pulled the lists people have mentioned here and will get started. it's tough to read at all though, with two little kids and working full time! so i'll see how i can squeeze it in.

my non profit pays well compared to others, and we just started the 4% match, so that's nice too. a big deciding factor will be how well my DH's job goes, he started at a new dealership (service side not sales) and they really have the potential to double or triple their current business so he is skating through right now, but things might look greener in a year or two.

like i've said before, we're also squeezed out of the insane housing market around here, and i refuse to live in the boonies or extend DH's commute even more, so we're planning to invest what we would pay in a decent sized mortgage in the hopes of owning a house later down the road.

everyone has already been so generous with their thoughts and advice, i'm so glad i found a place to share my ideas and get informed feedback.