Just a 48-year-old mom of 2 in Northern California. My kids are Monkey Monkey(MM) and Drama Llama (DL). I am married to Monkey Hubby (MH). We had an unexpected $500 expense come up in November. That's when I knew that I give up on 2025 goals.
I had already re-evaluated goal progress when paying for our big anniversary trip. While I felt it was silly to be stingey for our 25th, re: the big picture, I also didn't have any real plan to pay for this. I didn't want to touch longer term funds. I decided at the time (when paying for the trip) that we were still on track for:
**9% to retirement (minimum for match)
**Mortgage goal (done)
**Investment goal
I pondered IRAs more as we ended up with $2,500 in unexpected expenses at the end of the year. & the $500 was purely optional but we decided to go ahead with that. It was an opportunity that came up.
I completely give up on IRAs this year, other than the 'we have until April' factor.
I was surprised when I re-evaluated goals again (looking closer at the goals) at how realistic our goals were this year. I had left 'maxing out' as a stretch goal (re: unexpected money).
We spent about $9K over our modest vacation budget, this year. It was very one-off. We may or may not fail on our $6K IRA goal. (I am waiting for my bonus to sort out, in addition to the 'we have until April' factor.) I think we did pretty good considering excessive, one-off spending.
Reasons I am not stressed:
**Last I looked, our net worth was up $100K for the year.
**We are still living well below our means.
(This is very obvious because if I deduct 'college expenses paid with money someone else saved up for my kids' from our net this year, we are still somehow in the black. Just barely, but somehow still in the black, with income exceeding expenses. That's crazy to me! But we had a really good income year.)
Pain points:
**Cash is tight (this is somewhat moot while we have healthy investment levels; still have some money loosely earmarked for college that I am not sure we will use for college).
**I want to make more forward progress on taxable investments. It might just be this has to wait until kids are done with college. I like that we are at least mostly replacing the money we are spending on college. But I want to make more forward progress, while contributing less to retirement. It might just be an 'in our 50s' thing when we have higher income and lower expenses (re: empty nest and being older).
I was pondering my bonus (I saw a potential estimate) and was surprised how conservative I was with my tax planning this year. I paid in taxes presuming I wasn't going to put anything to IRAs. What!? I think it was me trying to lessen the pain a bit, re: massive tax increases when kids are done with college. (Which for the long run is very *shrugs* and fair. But in the short run, I will still have some mega kid expenses and it will be painful.)
I am so relieved I played the tax planning so conservative. If I do get a bonus (likely) I won't need to pay a chunk to taxes.
The other reason the pendulum swings: I put something like 120% of my bonus last year to 401K. (All of my bonus, plus moved some of my savings over to 401K). It was a '30% to retirement' year. So if we just do 10% to retirement this year, it will even out. Still hitting a 20% average.
Other posts if I ever get to them... Work and home life are both a little extra right now.
I really and truly started this as a 'I give up' (Crazy year!) post and was surprised in the end how sensible my financial planning was earlier this year. I think setting seperate stretch goals was a lot of that. A general mindset of dialing things down. I wanted to dial down savings and I think we achieved that.
December 22nd, 2025 at 02:03 pm 1766412190
December 22nd, 2025 at 09:11 pm 1766437886