I've been chipping away at putting money in the emergency fund and I realized that I forgot about the money that I keep in the credit union at home for easy access in case of an emergency that happens that I don't have time to wait for money in the online bank to get here.  That savings account also has any overage on money I save for other stuff throughout the year.

For instance I put $75 a month into savings for the garbage bill, which only comes every 2 months, not monthly.  Divided in half, each month is $73 and some change, so the extra just stays in savings.  I save $200 a month for insurance so I can pay the 6 months all at once and get the discount instead of paying monthly, but it usually just amounts to $185 a month, so that extra stays in there.  And of course there are dividends.  So I reconciled my savings today with what I am saving for, which is car insurance, house insurance, property taxes, and it has $75 currently for garbage, and everything else is Emergency Fund.

So the total in there for the Emergency Fund is $1965.17.  Usually I only keep $1500 in there, but I haven't reconciled the extra in a couple of years, so I guess it has built up and I didn't pay attention.  I might have added to it here and there with some rolled coin during covid when my other credit union was on limited hours.  That is where I normally deposit rolled coin and then transfer the money to the online EF.

I saved $85 from the grocery budget this pay period and was able to do a roll of quarters $10 and a roll of pennies 50¢ for a total deposit of $95.50 to the online EF, bringing the online EF to $393.91.  The total EF between the two accounts is now $2359.08.  That is an increase of 2274.71.

Retirement has been going gangbusters since the 10th of the month.  It was trucking along for the first ten days doing nicely as it has been since October, but boy did it take off on the 10th of January. And it was a three paycheck month, and the company got all three contributions in by the 31st for once, so those are in there, too, and I am not even counting those in the crazy goodness, but they are in the total.  I am nauseously optimistic that it will continue, assuming nothing too crazy happens.  Holding my breath on that one.

So the total increase in retirement this month is $10,105.00 exactly.  Taking out the contributions, we have $5800.31 left that was not our contributions.  The gains made from 1/1 to 1/9 was $901.22.  Then from 1/10 to 1/19 it was a gain of $1954.86.  Then on 1/20 to 1/31 it was a gain of $2944.23.  I was thrilled.  This brings total retirement between the 401K and the IRA to $209,534.57, taking that total over 200K for the first time.

I don't normally say the amount of our static retirement account, just have it added into net worth, because it doesn't gain interest, just yearly lump sums, but if I add that to the above retirement account, the total is $276,174.31 giving us over a quarter of a million dollars in our retirement accounts alone.

I did want to mention here that I just bumped up our retirement contributions today so that on the next paycheck we will be sending 18% of DH's paycheck to the 401K instead of 17%.  The goal is to max out the 401K this year and maybe even get a bit in the catch up amount.  I didn't do it earlier, because I didn't know what a regular paycheck amount was going to look like for 2025.

And with it being a 3 paycheck month, I wanted to make sure what the regular paychecks were going to look like before I made the decision on whether or not I wanted to bump it up 1% or not.  Then they decided that the first paycheck was going to be the one they didn't take the insurance and other stuff out of just the taxes and 401K insted of the last one like they normally do since they put in new payroll software at the start of the year and they wanted to make sure they did the new tax year software right on a 3 paycheck month while they could correct it, so it wasn't the one to go buy.

Then I wanted to make sure both of the next two paychecks were the same, which they weren't.  One was two cents higher than the other, so I took the smaller one and used that as my base and then went and figured out how much more would be taken out if we upped our contribution to 18%.  And it is $80 more.  This year's paycheck is already $30 less than last year's because of higher tax withholding, which sucks.  It is a state thing, though, not a federal thing.  So our check will be even lower, but since we aren't eating out we have more money in our budget anyway, so it will be fine.

And hopefully DH will get a COL raise of 2% in July.  And there should be a ton more work coming in with Trump in office as the refineries move forward with work that had been put on hold for the last four years.  One of our local ones was in the process of retrofitting one area to process used cooking oil into biodiesel fuel when Trump left office and had to shut it down when Biden went in, because he shut down a lot of refinery stuff.  Even something like this that would be helpful to the environment.

My husband had been working on the plans for it, so maybe they will get that back again.  Plus a lot more actual oil work when the fields reopen.  And there are other things that were put on hold with the refineries, that are already in the works, including more stuff to protect the environment and make the refineries more efficient.  I foresee a ton of overtime starting in a few months.  Not sure if I am thrilled about that, because it has been nice having DH home more, but the money will come in handy in saving up for fixing the bathroom and in rebuilding the EF.  Well, that was a tangent.

So calculating the new amount of net worth:

$10,105.00 Increase in Retirement

+_2274.71 Increase in Emergency Fund

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$12,379.71 Total Increase in Net Worth

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$299,243.58 Old Net Worth

+_12,379.71 Increase in EF

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$311,623.29 New Net Worth Amount

So I've cracked $300K in total net worth.  Hitting some major milestones here and it feels really good.  My next big goals are to hit $500K in net worth and $300K in regular retirement funds.  I think taking it $25K chunks is good for now, unless things just race up super fast with the stock market.  It would be nice, but as fast as they race up, they can fall down, so you can't rely on anything to be there forever.

I am just hoping to make up for some of the losses of the Covid years.  We have just been really starting to in the last few months.  Now if feels like someone has put their foot down hard on the gas pedal.  Which is okay as long as we don't go so fast we smash into a tree.