A Little Bit of Jealousy, Then I Got Over It (with new money moves)

Ugh. I am both inspired by other people's stories and momentarily jealous. I was talking to a co-worker and I have surmised he lives in a million dollar house and based on that I think his salary is around $200k.

He's just so happy with his life and I loved that. I do think his white privilege landed him a lot of opportunity because from his own words... "I would just get asked to do things I've never done before." #TheresJustSomethingAboutYouITrust

Anyway, I'll save that raking of the coals for a different day. But basically after finding out how much his house cost - I was like how much do these people make! My gosh! Assuming his mortgage is $4k and that it takes 1 paycheck to pay it, it means his net pay is about $8k (at least). I just took the minimums. So for a 8k/mon spend, he would really only need 2.5 million to early retire. And I believe in earlier conversations he thinks he could do it by 55. And it's totally possible!

I just love it. He's so happy. He seems to have a nice family. A nice house. His kids are 12 and 13 so he'll be done raising "children" in like 5 years. And to me, I'm like he can just enjoy working from 45 to 55 and then retire into the sunset with his beautiful family in his beautiful house having climbed the career mountain. 

To me, that's a pretty nice life. 

A great sampling of the buffet of life. 

To me it always seemed out of reach. 

Retiring at 40 is not the same as retiring at 55 but if the trade off is a beautiful house and family and a lucrative career you're good at, then it would be worth it. 

We know I'm feeling the Holiday Feels right now...so I'm like oooing and aaahing at everything that resembles love. 

Meanwhile, I'm getting rejected left and right on the apps. The handful of people in real life I've asked to introduce me to someone said they know no-one. (That's not what the internet said would happen! Thanks for nothing, internet.)

I think if I could figure out how to enjoy this money, it would help, but I just can't. I just want to reach the next milestone. Full Stop. 

So to soothe myself, I just logged into some of my accounts. 

I think I'm nearing the optimizing stage of my financial journey. Once I reach my next milestone, I'm going to tidy up some of my investment allocations.

Namely, move more of my investments out of target date funds and into index funds like VTSAX or its counterpart.  As a novice investor, I was a big fan of the target date fund and it's served me well.  But now that I have a better appreciation of expense ratio fees and rate of returns, I'm feeling more motivated for a tune-up. 

I think I'll keep my investments at my robo-advisor for another year and re-assess. Everytime I get an alert on their periodic fees I choke up a little, but I'll leave it for now until I feel more confident transferring it to another broker.

As for my individual brokerage accounts, I'd thought about moving all to 1 broker but I think an intermediate stop will be just to move away from target date funds and into VTSAX or its counterparts where available. Right now, it's a mix of the two. So that should simplify things. 

Old 401ks from Call Center 1 and 2. They are in target date funds. I decided against rolling over into IRAs or into current 401k. What I will do is move those over into an index fund as well. The expense ratio goes down with that as well. I'm looking at the Fidelity 500 Index Fund. 

I will plan to keep my current 401k in a target date fund. 

So it's not the simplest, but it's simpler than it has been. 

I think if I were hardcore, I'd just put everything in VTSAX like the internet says to do including rolling over my 401k into an IRA. I actually don't have a good reason why I don't rollover my 401k other than I just don't.  Other than having the ability to invest it in anything I want, I don't see a real benefit.

I'm losing emotional safety nets each year, so I'm fine just taking my time and easing into things. 

In other news, I've been hearing bloggers talk about the price of groceries going up. I hadn't noticed it really until yesterday. 1 of the regular bottles of oil was $4 at Food Lion! I'm pretty sure it's been $2 in the past because I remember wondering if the sign was right. It was. 

So that's what's been going on since this morning. Did a little work. Made some spaghetti. Going to try to enjoy the holiday without getting too mopey.