Net worth update for Feb 2009

Just tallied up the net worth for the end of January. This is getting old. With the stock market declining 10% for the month I was not expecting any gain. Net worth is down to $194,274. That's a loss of $1,900 for the month...ahhh really a loss of much more if you include the $2K I put in. It was not a good saving month because of the excessive credit card bill. Mainly from the purchase of the new refrigerator. Next month I will start putting extra money into my cash account until I decide what to do with it.

Also, I started my taxes. I finally got all the forms and have done an initial upload of information into H&R Block. I have made the mistake of accidentally falling into the 28% tax bracket. Ugh...Turns out I will only get about $200 back on my Federal and maybe $1,200 back from my state. So much for the small windfall I was expecting. I believe that this occurred because my wife was not contributing to her 403b while she was on maternity leave. Also, she was getting paid by an insurance company (who covered her benefits while on maternity leave) who may not have been deducting all of the taxes they should have. This didn't impact the tax bracket rate we fell into but impacted the size of our refund. I have taken some quick action to ensure I will remain in the 25% tax bracket next year. I raised my 401K deduction from 8% to 14%. This is a big jump but I think I can do it. My first check with the new 14% deduction will occur in a few weeks. My only frustration with doing this is it limits the amount of money I will have access to in the short term for home improvements and building up my brokerage account/cash acccount. Having said that, putting more money into your retirement account is hardly a bad mistake to make. This bump will put us up to over $20K of contributions for the year into our 401K/B accounts. Not including the matches that we get at 6.5% and 9% each. I also plan on putting more money into one Roth IRA for us. All in all this is a lot of money going into retirment accounts for us.

Don't expect any reall good news in the next few months. I expect the Dow Jones to go up and down from 8000 to 8800 for the next 6 months. ugh.