Starting off the New Year

To kick off the New Year, I met with my Learnvest financial planner. I really like her and value her advice. This year I'm tackling the same problem as last year which is getting my cash surplus invested. It sounds ridiculous, but I haven't even gotten last year's increase invested and now I have a big chunk to invest again this year. I can't keep up. I get so nervous about dumping a lot into the market. But once I set up auto investment, I can truly set it and forget it. It's just that to get the cash invested in a timely manner I would have to be making large buys each month. Right now I'm only going in about 10K at a time, which is not doing much to make a dent in my stash.

I have also convinced my planner that I don't need to replace my full income in retirement or even 85% of it. I know the exact number that I spend each year, and what part of that is for housing (almost 40%!), so in today's dollars I need about 60K a year with a mortgage and 36K a year without one. Of course that # doesn't include inflation.  If I used the Mr. Money Mustache formula I would need to save 25x the amount I need each year, so either  $1.5 million or $900K.  I think to be safe I would only be comfortable with the higher #. The planner's target number is going to be more like $2 million, but that's better than the like $4 million she is currently targeting which is most likely never going to happen.

Happy saving!