Reinvesting in my future

I became aware of Mr. Money Mustache a few weeks ago and have read a few posts - though it's the commenters that really interest me! Part of his philosophy is that you should have your "little green employees" working for you all the time, as hard as possible. After reading some of his stuff, I started thinking again about a plan I'd had a while back - to buy some DRIP stocks. If you aren't into stock trading, a DRIP is a dividend reinvestment plan. When you get dividends from a dividend-bearing stock, a stock that has a DRIP allows you to use the dividends to just buy more stock. I find this quite a keen idea, because when I was a teen a family friend gave me a single share of AT&T stock. Over the years with the DRIP in place (and some timely stock splits) it became about eight shares of Verizon, which I then sold to buy the furniture in my first apartment. Not too shabby! So I've been looking around to see what kinds of DRIP stocks I can buy through online trading, since I am far too lazy to actually mail anything to anyone, and started looking into what I might like to buy. I'm working out the details of selling my business, and while most of that money was intended to pay for the wedding, I do want to set some aside to invest. I feel like I spend so much time worrying about paying down debt that I forget about taking advantage of time while I am young to make money grow for me. Debt will always be there for me to pay off, but if I don't do some investing, there won't be anything there when I do pay off that debt. I think I'm going to set aside about $500 to buy some DRIPs and maybe also put some money in my Roth IRA, which I also feel guilty about not contributing to this year! I do put money in my 401k but the whole idea of that is that I don't have to do anything. (Note the lazy.) Fiance's work has a Roth 401k of which I am very jealous. Maybe someday I will have a Roth 401k of my very own. But for the moment, I should really get on this investing bus before it passes me by.

And now for the rest of our life...

Now that the wedding preparations are in full swing, we decided that that was just not enough crazy and so Fiance has gone and gotten himself a brand new job! He actually was not looking for one - the company approached him. But this is a company he'd interviewed with a few years ago and really liked, so he was willing to give them a shot. They were so interested in him they actually skipped the phone interview and went straight to an in-person interview, then offered him the job only a few days later. He got the salary he asked for, and even got the extra week of vacation that he'd put in his offer response. It remains to be seen how it will work out for the long term, but most of the people at this company are there for DECADES.. so if he likes it, he could be there quite some time. I hear they have free donuts on Fridays, which is a stellar retention perk, if not the best for their health insurance costs.

One of the things that I was really happy to see about this company is that they offer not only a match for the 401k, but a Roth 401k, a 403b plan, a supplemental 457b plan, and after two years they'll start putting some percentage of his salary into a separate retirement account with NO match required. That is pretty darn sweet in my book. The best thing his previous company offered was a discount on employee stock. (Fiance had already set aside some money so decided to invest it in the old company's stock anyhow - he still thinks the stock will perform well and will probably keep buying more anyway.) I'm too laissez-faire of an investor to keep watch on a stock, but he finds it pretty interesting and is going to buy more of another company he worked for.

I'm glad that this is going to give Fiance a chance to catch up to me in retirement savings. Mine have not grown as much as I'd have liked during this wonderful recession of ours, but I've still got a lot more than most people my age in retirement accounts. Since Fiance was in graduate school during the years I was socking most of that away, he has not had a chance to catch up, and I think it's important that we at least try to get relatively equal amounts in our retirement accounts. We're both trying to consolidate old 401k accounts, both to save on fees and to actually figure out how much we even have. His earning power now outstrips mine pretty handily, but since we are saving most of our cash for the wedding, he doesn't know yet how much he wants to sock into his numerous options for saving at this new company. (Plus he is paid monthly which has kind of screwed up our budgeting system.) I would also like to raise my contribution percentage to my 401k, and put some more in my Roth IRA, but I feel like I have a lot of competing goals there.

We're on the home stretch for the wedding now - six weeks! It does kind of scare me how much cash we're ponying up for this, but in order to spend less, we'd have had to have a drastically different wedding and cut out a lot of people that are important to us. And while it will be financially painful for a little while, I'm not worried about the long term effects. I'll just be happy to be back on budget! Wish us luck!