Thanks for visiting Ultimate Money Blog! If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Mr. Money and I both have Roth IRAs with a brokerage account at the bank I currently work at.  Since they are in mutual funds, there is an annual fee for having the accounts.  Every year it’s been $15 since I’m an employee, and he’s my spouse.  Imagine my surprise when this year I received the bills and they were each $40! I almost had a heart attack.  I didn’t mind paying $15 a year, but $40 a year is way too much because the balances we have in those accounts doesn’t make up for it.  My account has around $400 (I put $500 in about 7 years ago and left it at that).  Mr. Money’s has more, which is good because he’s older. When I went to talk to the broker about it, he told me that the fee had gone up and they would try to get it waived for me.  However, if I wanted to close the accounts, [...]

Last Friday I logged into my employer’s human resources website to take a quick peek at my 401k balance.  I was just curious how much money I had in there.  I made a mental note of the balance, logged out, and went about my day.  Then this week happened and the economy and stock market decided to take a nose dive.  For the heck of it, I decided to log into the website again and check my balance.  It had gone down over $2,000 (which is a pretty nice percentage of the money that I have in it).  Whatever. Why am I not concerned?  First of all, I’ve got many years until I am going to retire.  I’m not going to touch that money for at least 30 years, so why get all worked up about it now?  Secondly, the stock market is going to go up and down- it’s just how it goes.  If I was one of those people who panicked and sold all my stocks I’d be losing a lot more than $2,000.  I’d lose the opportunity [...]

My employer offers a 401k for retirement savings.  I contribute 6% of my salary, and they contribute 4% of my salary and give me dollar for dollar matching.  I’ve contributed 6% for years, and it’s a number we’ve been comfortable with.  However, I got to thinking the other day how Mr. Money’s employer doesn’t offer any type of retirement savings (they haven’t ever) and how we probably need to get cracking on saving for retirement with him.  We each have a Roth IRA that are in mutual funds, and my account has around $500 in it while his has maybe $2500 in it.  That is all we have saved for retirement minus my 401k, which I know has a decent balance, but not as much as I’d like for both of us, especially with Mr. Money being 34 years old. This is what I’m thinking: I will take a set amount of his paycheck aside each month and transfer it to an ING account where it can stay until we’ve got enough to contribute to the Roth IRA.  The reason [...]