Back to Finance!

Well, the overlying response from everyone toward the blog has been a very interested reaction to my Financial Situation
I’m very glad to see that people actually think me wise enough to be worth reading.  Thank you.
Once I’ve completed going through my goals and such in a few days, I’ll begin giving advice I think essential to any financially successful person.  If that sounds interesting, check back on a regular basis!

So for today, I’m gonna go through a rough outline as to how I plan to accomplish my Short Term Goals.

Short Term Goals

1. Begin Maxing out my IRA contributions ($417/month)
2. Strictly adhere to my Income Allocation procedures
3. Reestablish a diversified position in the market of over $2K

Alright.
1.  The beauty of a Traditional IRA is that it comes out of pretax money.  The beauty of my age and income rate is also that I will end up keeping all of my taxes at the end of the year (most likely) because I wont end up falling into a tax bracket.  So I’ll start by setting aside 42% of my monthly income to this IRA.  It lessens my tax liability (because I’ll only be taxed on the remainder(total income-$417=taxable income)) and helps assure me a retirement.  I’ll also be going to Wachovia this coming week to discuss different IRA options.

2. I will be strictly adhering to my income allocation procedures.  This begins this month.  How can I keep myself accountable on this?  Well, the majority of my foolish spending is done while with my beauty of a girlfriend (what can I say, I’m a softy ) So I’ll be sitting down with her and working out a budget and income allocation procedure for both of us.  This way, we can both find “Official” methods toward dealing with our income and attack it as a team.  I’ll post the results of that meeting as soon as it happens.

3. This is probably the most difficult of my short term goals.  For two reasons, 1. It cant be done immediately; and 2. I have no real plan set for this yet.  It will simply take saving and investing.  I would prefer to do the investing in two chunks of $1000.  I had about a $3000 position in the market, but due to non-financial reasons It has disappeared; So I want to redevelop this.  I think I may start an on the side business and simply devote all income from it into the investment fund.  I’ll keep updating on what that will be.

Maranatha!
–Michael