We Will Retire!

Well, not anytime soon but one day my wife and I will both be retired. And with the year-end approaching it’s time to think about what we can do to help ensure that we’ll retire. So far we’ve been contributing to our 401k and 403b plans respectively and we both have pension plans where we work. We’ve also been really good at saving automatically to our ING DIRECT
accounts as well as 529 plans for our children. But we still haven’t opened up Roth IRA accounts for us both. This is going to change soon. I plan to open up accounts at Vanguard. We’re going to start with the minimum and work from there. We have until April 15th, 2008 to contribute for 2007. Our 2008 resolution is to contribute $8000 to our Roth IRA! I understand that the maximum is going up to $5000/each but I think $4000/each is more do-able for us. Our savings are at a good amount so we can concentrate now on retirement savings.

How will we do it? $8000 comes out to about $154 a week (weekly contributions will be a good way to take advantage of dollar cost averaging). We’ll re-work our automatic savings account contributions so that we have the money freed up to contribute to our Roth IRA accounts (that will be about $77/week for each of us). There will be less going to savings but we’ll still have enough to keep our savings growing.

This post is inspired by Cash Money Life who is starting up the Carnival of Financial Goals. To help promote the new carnival he’s giving away a 4GB iPod Nano to one reader who shares their 2008 financial resolution. Go check out the site for the rules.