Well, it has finally happened.  The IRA is back to where it was before the great Biden free fall of the stock market.  And it is actually above it by $263.49.  Only took what? Two years to recover?  Looks like Biden stock market year 4 is starting off well, just like year 3 ended well.  Just wish everything else was improving, like food prices and electricity and gas (for the house, not the car).  And who knows what will happen if a real world war breaks out, or a civil one down in Texas for that matter.  But anyway. My combined retirement accounts are so close to $150K, I can taste it.  And yes, I label stock years by president.  I've done it since Bush 2 Electric Boogaloo, when DH got his first 401K.  Just makes it easier to remember.

$133,856.64 401K New Total

$_14,253.86 IRA New Total

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$148,110.50 Total Retirement Accounts New Total

-143,668.67 Previous Amount

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$__4,441.83 Gains since December 31st

Now about $2700 of those gains were due to contributions from DH and his job, so the rest was interest and that was $1741.83 for the month of January.  Not at all a bad way to start off the year.

I have $1,889.50 left to go to hit $150K in the retirement accounts. I went ahead and bumped it up to 17% for next payday, since 16%, which we have done for the first three paychecks of the year, didn't really make that much of a change to our bottom line, even with the FSA money being taken out pretax.  We will live with 17% for a few paydays and if it doesn't seem to be a burden, I'll bump up to 18%.  The ultimate goal is to hit 20%, which will get us to our ultimate catch up max if we did it all year.  I don't think that will happen this year, unless DH gets a cost of living raise in July, then we could adjust and he's bound to get some OT to carry us over the line.  Maybe.  I know the more we contribute pretax, the lower our taxes will be come income tax time.

So maybe in 2025 we can completely max out, but that all depends on what taxes will be like then and how it will effect our paychecks and that depends on who runs Congress and who the president will be and I really don't want to think about that until November.

Speaking of taxes, it looks like we will be getting back around $365.  It's not final numbers yet, because we haven't gathered our interest yet on the savings accounts, but I can't imagine that will make much of a change since we only have about $11K in savings.  This is the closest we've got to $0, which is what our goal is.  We don't want the government having an interest free loan on our money and we don't want to have to pay either.  This amount is reasonable.

Well, that's it for this post.  I need to do a health update for you all.  It's good news.  Maybe tomorrow.  It's 11:00 p.m. and I no longer seem to be a night owl.  Good 2024 habits.