Monday, November 30, 2015

Retirement Accounts (Update) - November 2015



As our readers already know, our family has switched our focus towards diligently building our Dividend Stocks Portfolio and to some extent P2P Lending Accounts in an effort to build additional income streams for retirement so we don't have to solely rely on the typical retirement vehicles.

We will still continue to track are retirement accounts (pension, 457K, Roth IRAs) as they are still part of our retirement plan.  Plus, although they are mainly invested in mutual funds, we still need to keep an eye on them and re-balance them periodically.

EXISTING RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS

(NOVEMBER UPDATE):


Since we see such little change in these accounts, we decided a few months ago to stop providing monthly reports of our retirement accounts. In fact, our last update was in July, over 4 months ago!! 

Below is a quick update to show the current values of our retirement accounts as of November 1, 2015.  For a more comprehensive list of values and details of these accounts, please visit the RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS page on our blog.


As of July 1, 2015

PENSION
Cash Value of Pension$232,246 
($8,065 increase from our July update of $224,181)

During these last few months, it appears that the only shining start is our pension.  Not a bad thing because, as a public sector employee, this will likely make up a big portion of my retirement income. In all, we saw a little over $8K increase in our pension value. 

457K
Total value of 457K: $120,400
($2,271 decrease from our July update of $122,671)

Our 457K (public employee version of a 401K) has been somewhat of a disappointment.  Currently, we only contribute the 3% minimum to receive our employee 3% match.  With how it has performed lately, I'm am glad we don't contribute more.  The more we dabble in dividend paying stocks and other investments vehicles, the less confidence I have in the 457K plan.  We will continue to invest just enough to get the company match but I don't see us investing more than that any time soon.

Roth IRAs
Total value of Roth IRA accounts: $56,752 
($185 increase from our July update of $56,567)
  
We do continue to contribute a small amount each month to both mine and my wife's Roth IRA.  Although we would like to max out these contributions, we are currently only contributing about 25% of the max to each account.  These accounts didn't see much growth these last few months but then most of the market has remained fairly idle during the recent summer months. Although we would have loved to see bigger growth, we would gladly accept some growth (albeit very small) over no growth or a decrease. 


As it stands, the total amount of our retirement accounts is currently valued at: $409,398 (up $5,979 from the $403,419 reported back in July).  


Click below to view retirement accounts page

RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS


2 comments:

  1. Looking good, AFFJ -- totally understandable that you don't want to contribute too much in the 457k account. My 401k and my wife's 403b are both constrained to mutual funds. I wish that was not the case. I'd much rather invest in dividend growth stocks!

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    1. They say that sometimes boring is good. Don't get me wrong, I like boring especially if it means I'm not having to actively manage the account, but boring should continue to make money. haha

      Managing our dividend stocks portfolio is work but actually seeing it dividends come in each month and seeing the account slowly grow over time has some great rewards.

      Thanks for commenting. Take care, AFFJ

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