re: MT: Keeping The Course

Thanks Rick, I appreciate the kind words!

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Does this include kids in the picture, or are kids perhaps on the horizon?

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We have two kids, 10 and 5. Daycare is a drain monthly, anywhere between $800-$1,000 a month depending on how many Fridays there are, but it has gotten a little better since my smallest started school. Not wishing my kids younger years away at all, but I cannot wait until I cut the daycare off the payroll!

Recently, and again something I should have started earlier, I set up savings accounts for my kids at the local credit union. Whenever they get money, I make them put 15% into the account, since that is the number suggested by most as what it takes to retire. I tell them that is what my wife and I put in, so they should as well. I am hoping that by getting them into the habit early of paying themselves first, they will not be where I was when I started working.

I also bought my kids stocks. I was tired of getting 0.7% interest for the college money I was putting away, about $2,500 per kid and wanted to teach them about the market. My 10 year old (boy) is a huge gamer. Loves his 360. So, naturally I invested in MSFT for him. I show him periodically how much we started with and where it is at now, up 23%!

For my daughter who is 5, she loves chocolate and her "chockie milk" so I bought her HSY. She is still way to young to try to get the point across, but I made a little money on it and have since bought KO, which is up around 12%.

Both have paid off well so far, and have been a good lesson to my 10 year old. He thinks its cool that he has earned an extra share so far (DRIP) for doing nothing.

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I've been fortunate to start while the market is climbing up. If it was steadily going down, I don't think I would have invested anything and just loaded down my savings. Neither are wrong (with regards to paying yourself), but at least now I have perspective on how to invest money into a Roth IRA, 401k and taxable accounts and an emergency fund to hang onto if the markets did dip.

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Man, I cannot tell you how frustrated I got when I was putting $50/month and getting a quarterly statement that showed my contributions of $150/quarter and my account value had dropped $175 for the quarter. I was completely ignorant to how the markets worked, the history of the markets, etc and hit a span when I just quit putting money in there. So stupid looking back.