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). Pay cash for college ✔
Just one more tuition payment left for MM(22). Crazy!
$10K to Savings ✔
Final tally was $13,185.
Saved at the last minute, by a cash gift. Which made up for a wild spending year.
$7,500 to Investments ✔➕
Final tally: $7,900
Was able to surpass the stretch goal with my bonus.
$1,700 to mortgage ✔
Mortgage goal is non-negotiable. I will not have a mortgage for more than 30 years on this house (while healthy and well employed).
9% Income to Work Retirement Plans ✔
MH and I both contribute the minimum for 401k match. The 9% includes employer contributions.
$6,000 to IRAs 2025❓
Decided to pass on this goal. $0 to IRAs.
I put 30% to retirement last year, and wanted to focus on other goals. This decision was before the cash gift. But I think it's important to stay the course.
We contributed 20% average (to retirement) during 2024/2025. This is probably the #1 reason we are putting IRAs on ignore. Will contribute $0. The other reason I suppose is because we hit a big retirement milestone. & the stock market is high. I am sure there's many reasons. I'd be more inclined to take advantage if we could get in some cheaper buys.
The twist: Just noticed that we are about $7,000 into the 22% tax bracket for 2025. Ouch! When our taxes were otherwise ~$0, our effective tax rate was 25%+ (on IRA contributions). Because taxes are complicated. So I can only imagine that we are talking about paying 35%+ for every dollar we don't put into retirement (with the 10% tax bump). I guess this goal is on hold and I will very likely put at least $6K to our IRAs if we get a third of that money back. I am really trying to back off retirement contributions but it's just not happening. This is the flip side of efficiency and all those years I pointed out my friends and coworkers with 2x or even 3x our household income were netting the same. I am feeling the middle class squeeze. The cost of spending more is... A 33% tax penalty? Maybe I just need to let it go. I have 4 months to ponder.
Edited to add: Then I ran tax projections and I think it will be a $0 IRA year. But I will just leave this as a question mark until April 15th.
SUMMARY
Retirement goals will start to decrease as we enter financial independence 'coast' mode. The 'saving for retirement' part is over and now it's about letting that money compound. & with that, we can start to enjoy our money more. I don't see the point on keeping the petal to the metal for the next 10 or 15 years. We are starting pre-retirement and enjoying our money.
2026 Goals
TBD
I need to run tax projections and figure out what my actual net paycheck will be. From there, I can set my taxable investment goal.
Bigger Picture
The bigger picture is that we are probably going to move our longer term savings % down from 30% to 20%. We've personally never felt comfortable putting less than 30% to savings/investments. We are starting to experiment with 20%, which I am well aware is still higher than average. But for us, it feels very lax.
It's probably more precise to say that we are moving retirement savings down from 20% to 10%. Will see how the rest shakes out.
January 7th, 2026 at 02:40 pm 1767796801