Finance

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Financial Snapshot 8/10/13

by Harlan Leave A Comment

Screen shot 2013-08-10 at 9.04.48 PM

 

 

I use mint.com to keep track of my credit card accounts, IRAs, and student loans. My student loans are by far the bulk of my debt – about $50,000.

I currently have IRAs with two companies, Fidelity and USAA, and a brokerage account with Fidelity (the one my Fidelity Investment Rewards card plugs into). There’s about $4,000 among them.

My immediate goals are to pay down student loan debt, save up for a down payment on a house, and put the rest into an IRA until I max it out. This will definitely be a “slow and steady wins the race” kind of proposition.

My current salary is about $60,000 ($50,000 base + yearly bonus + reimbursements for healthcare).

My first Financial Snapshot. Really putting it all out there. Here goes nothin’…

Direction

by Harlan 1 Comment

I’ve decided to take this blog in an ever-so-slightly different direction.

Over the past few months, I’ve done a lot of soul-searching about what I want to be doing as far as a career path. I’m obviously hugely interested in travel, and to some extent travel writing, and that’s certainly one side of it. The other side is that I love to mine the terrain of points and miles. I’ve been getting more and and more into improving my finances – beyond just credit score.

I started investing. Slowly, at first. Now I have about $4,000 saved in IRAs and want to continue on a path that makes me financially independent. My goal is to save up $500,000 for my eventual retirement – while also paying off my student loan debt and saving up enough to buy a house in Vermont.

I’m just getting started on this new journey and want to share my thoughts here as they evolve. It’s been wonderful to document my travels and interest in points/miles, and hopefully writing about my finances will be a natural extension of that. It’s way more convoluted that any airline loyalty program, but I’ve found the best course of action is to keep it simple. And writing here will help to keep me accountable to my goals. It will involve a lot of purging, cutting out what’s unnecessary, and keeping an even close eye on my monthly budget. But I’m up for it.

Of course the travel stuff is going to stay, too. Thanks to all the supporters I’ve received so far here on Out and Out. Looking forward to interacting more with all of you.