Lazy Man and Money

How Much Is My 401(k) Plan Worth?

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It turns out that my new company doesn’t offer a 401(k) plan. This was a little alarming. I can’t really think of a reason why a company wouldn’t offer one. My last company of 20 employees did. It didn’t match any of my contributions, but at least I could defer my taxes.

So it got me wondering, how much does this impact me? SmartMoney.com comes to the rescue with this article and calculator. Using it, I found that my old 401(k) plan was worth $6,613. It’s going to be disappointing to lose my 401(k) and the forced savings, but I still think I’m going to do fine.

Cheap Mortgage Rates Coming Back?

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I hadn’t been following mortgage rates very closely over the last 6 months or so. I assumed they’d continue to rise as they have been. Just yesterday I got an interesting mail from Bankrate.com. It was an alert for mortgage prices that I set up over 2.5 years ago. Turns out that in Massachusetts you can get a 30-year fixed, 0 point, rate for 5.625% if you have perfect credit and every duck in a row. I found that’s it’s nearly impossible to get the rates posted, but even if you could get 5.875% or 6% you wouldn’t be doing half bad.

Maxing out my 401K in a whole new way…

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Around May of last year, the small company I work for finally started offering a 401k plan. That left me about half a year to save the 14K limit. To get there I ended up putting 75% of about 6 weeks of paycheck. Of course those 6 weeks were just around the holidays when money is the most tight. I actually dipped into my savings so that I could max out my retirement. I’m not sure if that’s the right thing to do, but it feels right to save on taxes.

That was then, but now it’s behind me. Or is it… With the impending move to San Francisco, I might be getting a new job that requires me to wait until I can join the 401k. Worse yet, it may not even have a 401k plan. So I’ve decided to do it again. Doing a little rough math, I think I would need to go to the 75% for the next two months. It’s going to be tough and I don’t know if I can do it. However, if I do, I should be able to build up my savings in the last three months of the year.