📍 But like sometimes financial advisors, sometimes CPAs, they will make you feel inferior because they quote unquote, know all the information. And when you call them, they may make you feel that way.

They may make you feel scared that you don’t know. So it’s oh, I’m not, I’m just not gonna touch it. I don’t know. No. Get the information and make an educated decision and then decide what you wanna do with it.

  📍 📍 Okay. Tell us why you’re here.

Okay, so I am like the budget nerd person in our family. Okay. And we have done extreme things in our family to get outta debt and to get ahead and all the things. And mainly the driver was we had infertility issues. So we had eight years of doing infertility before we got our kiddos.

And so sacrificing doing that, like that’s just a norm for us. And I. When Covid hit, I was a kindergarten teacher. I taught virtually for two years, and then after we had our second, we got our second baby. I became a stay at home mom, and so that year that we were like prepping, we saved my whole paycheck so I could be a stay home mom and balanced all the things that way.

So it, it was great. But there’s some things about being a stay at home mom that’s different. Once you do all the things to become like a stay at home parent that just pop up late in later years. That, that I have questions on. So one of the big things is like my husband still does his retirement and.

I have like he, we put into his retirement each month, but I don’t know if I should be putting into retirement for my own, for myself. Does that make sense? Because I’m not bringing any income in, but I still have I have my teacher retirement and then I have a, I think it’s a Roth IRA that I have money going into.

So what is your thinking?

I  think we need it just a little bit more context. Let’s talk about like you have no, you said you have no debt or you have some debt.

  📍 📍 We still, we just have some debt. We’ve been debt free for two and a half years. And then we’re expecting another little one. And we needed a bigger car. So we have some debt now, but we have a plan to pay it off,

 credit card debt, basically. You just have a vehicle and I guess the IVF stuff.  📍 📍

It’s, no, it’s just the vehicle. All the IVF stuff we paid cash for,

 that’s so awesome. Okay even, yeah, so even though you’re not working, you can still contribute to your Roth IRA and investments. And, if you’re, if you are looking at the budget and the budget is good and you have.

Money for everything that month, and you have your savings buckets funded, which means for upcoming things that you have. So Christmas, birthdays, annual bills things that happen quarterly and just, we wanna make sure that you are totally planned out to be able to afford investing every month.

  📍 📍 Yep. And we have a pretty good set. Right now we have we have a senior also, I have a stepson who’s a senior this year. And so we have a child support payment that will be stopping this summer. And so I think that’s when we’ll have a little bit more cushion. ’cause we’ll have some of the extra from

 you’re making the child’s support payment.

  📍 📍 Yeah. We make a child support

 Okay. And I and so then you’re not claiming this senior they’re not someone you’re able to claim anyway, right? On your

  📍 📍 No.

 Yeah,

  📍 📍 it alternate, it alternates every other year,

 Just consider that part too some, somehow in the. Throws of senior life.

Sometimes we forget that the next year’s tax return is gonna be looking a little impacted, a little different. So we wanna make sure that’s taken care of so we don’t get behind. But yeah, you still want to, so really I think something good for you guys to do is to think about what you want.

Yeah. Dreams, retirement to look like. And then we in our simplified budget system, so you said you’re a budget. We have retirement tabs and. It’s what do I want my retirement to look like? And then I, and then the next sheet, you go ahead and put what that, what the numbers you already have and what you wanna get to, and it tells you how much you really need to be saving every year.

And we think our, my money is your money, right? The main reason that you want to both contributing is because you can. Yeah. Is because you can, not because you have to. If you could subsist on his retirement all by itself, then it’s not necessary. But also obviously.

Tax, tax write off and all that kind of stuff. And taxable income and all that. It’s not a bad thing to do but what you wanna do is look at your retirement and see what income we want and how are we going to get there with and retirement is different. It’s one way to say it.

What you mean is investing. Like we need to get, have enough investments ready for what we want our retirement picture to look like. And think about the word retirement for a second. ’cause that we’re not necessarily saying 67 or 70 years old or whatever we’re saying. You get to decide that. Yeah.

At what age do you wanna take a step back? At what age? Like we, we like to put timelines near it. So where do you wanna be when your kids are graduated high school? Where do you wanna be when they graduate college, or, that to me is easier to see as a parent. Like my timeline. So maybe look at it that way.

But yeah, so you know, when you look at your budget, put all the income in, and you have your bills, your spending, your savings buckets, all that done, then look at your investment opportunities and say, what can we do here? What is the best option for us? I would say if you guys. Qualify for a Roth whatever your husband is doing at work, if he has a Roth 401k option.

Choose that first over the regular 401k. So always try to max out all of your Roth options first before you do any regular IRAs or 4 0 1 Ks. That would help you maximize your income later on. Yeah. And Vanessa said it. We both have been stay-at-home moms, so we, you are working, but you’re not, quote unquote earning a paycheck.

But as long as you’re filing, together and all that, then you can still you can still have a Roth IRA even though you don’t have, quote unquote any paychecks, but you’re working your booty off, we know that. Especially expecting another one. Woo. Okay. Lets just add it

  📍 📍 it’s not, so it’s not a set amount. So it’s not saying, okay, I need to be doing 15% as he’s doing the 15% as well.

 So the word I need to needs to be determined based on your goals, and Shana said, put that in that information. If you have the simplified budget system, put that information in the retirement calculators in the back because that’s gonna tell you what you need to do. We can look all over social media, we can look all over ads and.

Scrolling through videos and they’ll tell you what you should have, coulda, would’ve, but everyone’s life is different. So you need to make that decision based on your money and your goals. Yeah. But if you can’t, so once you do that, depending on what you guys already have, you probably, might get up to that 15%.

And Vanessa said, if your budget allows for it and you guys are used to sacrificing, you said, and that’s what’s important to you to get that going then? Yeah, absolutely. You can both be doing, I wouldn’t say 15%, you’re gonna hit, I don’t know what the, the cap is for your Roth. For your Roth.

That’s probably what the first goal is. Yeah. This year it’s 7,000 a person. Yeah. Actually last year. So a lot of times people trigger that first and then they go to the next thing. So it just, it depends on what you want your strategy, but again it does depend on what you already have saved and what you want your retirement to look like and when you want your retirement to start.

A lot of that, a lot of that kind. Does that make sense? That, that it is dependent on those things. 📍 ​

  📍 📍 oh, I said I also have a teacher. I don’t, it’s not a pension, but it’s a plan. But I have no idea how much money, like every time I try to find out, they’re like, oh, it depends on the market and when you pull out and all this stuff. So like I have over a decade in whatever the teacher for our state plan is.

But then I also have a separate one from before I became a teacher that I have, and I’ve just rolled that over into a personal one since I’m not working now. And

 okay.

  📍 📍 It’s hard to like, like my husband’s, like he has a pension from a previous job and then he has his retirement fund so he can calculate `out okay, this is exactly how much I have right now in retirement, where it’s a little more tricky for me being a former teacher.

And then now.

 so I was a teacher and I will, I’ll tell, actually that’s where my, my, where I was going with my comment was you need to find out how much money you do have there, and you wanna get your hands on it, because no offense, sometimes if you leave your money in a job that you no longer work they charge you a maintenance fee every month for you leaving it there because you.

Because you’re no longer an employee there. So you actually get charged for leaving it there. So double check on that. But you can always roll it into a regular IRA. And if you didn’t contribute to a Roth IRA last year, you can actually do a backdoor Roth and take $7,000 from your I your IRA that you have now and transfer it into your Roth IRA, which is gonna save you in taxes in the long run.

So there’s just a lot there I would research. Backdoor Ross, average research transferring from teacher fund, and you call that teacher. Call both of them. And if you have both sitting there and they’re separate, call them, there’s no penalty in transferring it into a Vanguard or Fidelity where you have control of where it’s at and it’s not sitting somewhere random.

And then in 20 years you think, oh, I think I’m gonna check that out. Yeah. And if you can, like Vanessa said, I love the way she put that put, get your hands on it because you can do your own. Vanguard or Fidelity will help you to see where the, this is where we are gonna get by this year or whatever.

You can put it in your retirement year. You can project yourself. That’s what we are gonna have you do. We wanna know how much you have now, and then we’re gonna do the math to see where it’s gonna be generally give or take, regardless of the stock market. Like just what where do we, and it sounds like you guys are in a really good position already.

We have random retirement accounts everywhere. Yay. Hold on really quick. Don’t let them tell you like, oh, we don’t know ’cause it’s based on the market. No, how much can I pull out right now? Will I be penalized? All of that stuff. And then what can you put it into to continue to grow some places you can’t, but I’m just saying you need to do the research there.

  📍 📍 Okay. Yeah. ’cause I do have all the, all my other stuff is in fidelity right now. All my other retirement cash is in fidelity, so I. I’ll ask that. I just didn’t know. ’cause like I didn’t know if it was a state thing with teachers. ’cause like I was like, okay, can I, like how much is it? And they were like, oh no, you’re not allowed to touch it.

I’m like, okay. So I will do some more research on that if

 and I just wanna encourage you because you are a nerd, a budget nerd you said. And so I think you’re like Vanessa here. You can take this and become an expert in it and run this this as the family CFO run this retirement game and take the ball and actually run with it. ’cause you are already there.

You have so much extra time with the three, almost three kids, so it’s fine. Like you have time, Stephanie, but it’s

  📍 📍 I know.

 so just research it and and And they’re gonna discourage you from pulling it out. If there’s not a penalty, they’ll discourage you anyways. But just.

Know, be in charge of it and get as much information as you can so that way you can make an educated decision and love them. But like sometimes financial advisors, sometimes CPAs, they will make you feel inferior because they quote unquote, know all the information. And when you call them, they may make you feel that way.

They may make you feel scared that you don’t know. So it’s oh, I’m not, I’m just not gonna touch it. I don’t know. No. Get the information and make an educated decision and then decide what you wanna do with it.

  📍 📍 Okay. Okay. That sounds like a good

 You’re a money girl. We want you to be in charge of it.

  📍 📍 and I was like, there’s all this stuff. And I, like I said, that was the one thing of becoming a stay home mom, I didn’t think about. Like you think about can we live off of one income? Not necessarily like planning the future with a one income.

 Yeah. Hey, one thing at a time. Yeah. Okay. You were just trying to plan the now, and now you’ve got that under control. So now you got the, all these humans you need to raise the future and yeah. And so I just think you’re obviously on top of it and I think you can take on the role of managing this for your household. I believe that. So let us know. Do all that and email us at hello@budgetbesties.com if you have any other questions. Okay.

  📍 📍 Okay. Sounds good.

 Thank you so much

  📍 Bye.

 and hopefully everybody feels better.