Since I was barely on my feet January 1st, I had not gathered the data in for our retirement accounts' standings.  To begin with, we started out 2022 in pretty good shape.  There had been some ups and downs in 2021, but for the whole year over all, we'd done well.  So we started out 2022 with $57,978.02 in the 401K and $13,925.02 in the IRA.  So between the two our retirement was at $71,903.04.

We do not contribute to the IRA so the losses are much more obvious there.  We ended the year with $11,437.47 or a -14.05% loss for the year with it.  We did contribute to the 401K, 16% of his salary, actually, with a contribution from his employer.  I don't remember how much and it changed mid-year and is changing again this year, going back up to 5% where it was pre-Covid, which will be great.

As for the 401K, it ended the year at $75,752.20, which at first glance might seem great.  It's a lot more than $57,978.02, right? That's $17,777.18 more than we started the year with, right?  Nope, because what came out of DH's paycheck, which was $23,000 and what came out of work's contributions, which 6270.23, we didn't come close to breaking even.  In fact, it flat our ate $11,493.25 of our contributions. Or that's what it feels like.  I know we bought stock and all that, blah, blah, blah.  It's still what it feels like.  And we had no gains, we had losses, and our losses were worse than the IRA percentagewise at -14.59%.

All in all, retirement ended the year at $87,189.67 or $15,286.60 higher than I started, about 55% of what was contributed.

It's not all bad news, though.  Since I was checking all of that today, I did notice that both the IRA and the 401K are up for the year so far.  The 401K is up 3.81% and now sits at $78,627.86 a rise of $2875.66 in just 12 days, and they have not yet added the contribution from the January 6th's paycheck, so that's all just interest.  I can't help but be a little excited since I haven't seen something like this in a year.  The IRA was 4.43% so it has risen by $529.64.

Together that is $3405.30, which brings the retirement total up to $90,594.97!  We cracked the $90K mark. If this year can just give us a positive rate of return, we will hit $100K in retirement.  They say when you hit that number things really start to change for you with your retirement adding up.  Of course, "they" weren't living in a recession, almost depression.

I still have some calculations to do to figure out current net worth, but will update that when I have it.

Oh, and we have bumped our retirement contributions up to 18% from 16%.  That will have us contritubing $27,000 this year.  Well,  just under since it won't start until the paycheck on the 20th.  That catch up contribution amount is $30,000 if you are 50 or older, so we could go up to 20% of our pretax income to get that, but I'm not sure we are ready for that.  I know we can do 18%, because we were doing it.  2% of DH's income was going to the FSA card before and since it isn't doing that this year, we decided the best place for it to go is to retirement.  We'll still get the tax savings through the year, just in a different way.

One of the reasons I decided to do that was because it was $115 that was taken out every two weeks pretax for the FSA card, but without it, we were only getting $28 a paycheck extra.  The rest was going to taxes.  Well, screw that, government.  That money is going to work for us for the rest of our lives, not go to you and your irresponsible spending habits.  We didn't need an extra $28 before and we don't need it now, but $115 each paycheck will go far for retirement.

So that's that, 18% for the next year, unless for some unfathomable reason they give him a raise this year.  I can't imagine him getting another one so soon, the one he got last year was so big.  I wouldn't expect another one before the summer 2024 and even then, not like this last one.  Even if it is a small one, if we raise the retirement percentage by whatever it is and continue to live on what we lived on before until we max out and put anything that is left in an IRA, that would be good, too.