A New Year, A Clean Slate

by FrugalBabe on January 2, 2008

I never make new year’s resolutions.  It’s always seemed like a silly tradition to me, and I tend to make modifications to my life on an on-going basis whenever I see something that needs to be tweaked.  It doesn’t have to be a specific day – I just set goals whenever they come to me. 

But I am feeling a lot of anticipation regarding financial goals that we’ve set for 2008.  There’s something about a new year that’s exciting, especially this year, since it will be the first time since 2003 that we’ve started a year with a clean slate, not trying to pay off debt.  I’m excited to see how much money we can earn in 2008, especially since we may be losing my library income once the baby’s born in May.  And I’m excited to see how quickly we can start making headway towards maxxing out our HSA and IRAs.  We’re going to focus first on the HSA, and try to max that out as quickly as possible.  Then we’ll move the focus to my husband’s traditional IRA.  And then my Roth IRA.  I know that the Roth is important and that 40 years from now we’ll be glad we had it.  But it’s hard to give up the instant gratification of a tax deduction that we get on the traditional IRA.  But I’m determined to make sure we get to my IRA before the end of the year. 

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  • http://calgirlfinance.blogspot.com calgirlfinance

    FrugalBabe, Why does your husband have a traditional IRA while you have a Roth IRA? I’m assuming it’s related to self employment retirement options. . . .

  • FrugalBabe

    Hi CalGirlFinanc. Until last year, we both had traditional IRAs. I still have mine, but I’ve stopped putting money into it, and instead I’m contributing to the Roth that I set up last spring. Eventually we want to stop contributing to my husband’s traditional IRA and open a roth for him aswell. The reason we didn’t just switch both of us to Roths is the that we’re still somewhat dependant on the tax deduction we get from the traditional IRAs. Our thought was to gradually wean ourselves off of it by opening one Roth first, and then another in a couple years. As for which one we did first, it was pretty much a coin toss, since all of our assets are joint and we don’t have seperate money.

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