The past month has been terribly busy with GF staying for 3 weeks, son for 2 weeks, air flights, lots of travel, lots of amusement parks, lots (and lots!) of swimming, so other than my automatic retirement saving, the rest of my money seems to have flittered away this past month. Oh well, this is the one month of the year it happens, and it will hopefully be the last major expenses for the remainder of the year.
Given that, as I am coming up on 50 yrs old, it was time to see if I was making my ultimate long term goal. That is:
I want to have $250,000 in my retirement accounts before my 50th birthday.
I came up with that goal 3 years ago, and today I went into my accounts to check on their status. 457 plan => $203k. Roth IRA => $52k. Add them up and I get $255,000+ in my accounts. I have other savings too, but I wanted just them to make up my quarter million, and they have done it. Of course with market swings they could go down again, but they were there at least for one day.
I came up with that amount because even if I don't save more that amount should double by the time I want to retire (12 years), and at that time I will have a pension (~ 40% of my final income), Social Security (~ 25% of my current income), and a safe withdrawl rate of 4% (~ 20% of my final income) so between the three of them (~ 85-90% of normal income) I will be able to get by just fine, especially with no debts.
Time to go celebrate (or at least to take a nap!)
Long term goal has been met -
August 1st, 2012 at 12:43 am
August 1st, 2012 at 02:12 am 1343787140
August 1st, 2012 at 02:22 am 1343787766
August 1st, 2012 at 03:54 am 1343793256
August 1st, 2012 at 04:10 am 1343794252
I prefer to believe my portfolio will be up, not down when the time comes for withdraws. Except for one American a/c I'm in positive territory compared to contributions. I jumped out of European holdings a couple of years ago and switched to REIT ETF. It's been doing better than expected.
August 1st, 2012 at 01:40 pm 1343828416
August 1st, 2012 at 01:53 pm 1343829207
August 5th, 2012 at 08:18 pm 1344197932
Jerry