Blogging Away Debt Our Journeys to a Debt-Free Life

by Ashley

Happy New Year!

I wish everyone a healthy and happy 2024!

‘Tis the season for new year resolutions or intentions. In the spirit of planning the coming year, I wanted to share my 2024 goals. For a look back on 2023, make sure to check out my review of my 2023 financial goals.

Just like last year, I’ve set my financial goals in 4 broad categories: short-term savings, investments, debt, and travel.

Short-Term Savings

I started 2023 with loooots of different short-term savings that I kept in many different Capital One 360 savings accounts.

In my budget I still have many of my same short-term savings goal categories (e.g., car repair fund, semi-annual fees, etc.). However, I’ve removed my savings for student loan payments and replaced it with a new short-term savings category strictly for home repairs. And then I’ve opened a new brokerage account and am going to start investing money there.

Which brings me to my next category of longer-term investments:

Investments

In this post I talked about some new financial goals as I was mulling over open enrollment options.

Here’s what I’ve done:

This is slightly different than what I’d originally said in the post above. That’s because I was planning initially to increase my HSA contributions to $7750/year. However, I neglected to take into consideration the fact that my employer provides $1440/year for family HSA plans as part of employee benefits. That means I’m at the max contribution level at $6860.

My HSA contributions will now be lower than I’d originally planned, but I wanted to still be at a similar threshold for investments overall. So, I increased my 403B contributions by a comparable amount.

And, as mentioned above, I opened a brokerage account as a longer-term savings vehicle that I have outside of my normal retirement accounts. I haven’t included it in this table because I’m not going to be making recurring contributions. It will be more like here and there, stashing extra money away if/when we have it.

I’m really proud of this level of investment, as it represents a sizeable proportion of salary. I should mention this is on top of the 7% that is automatically deposited into my “normal” retirement account (and my employer matches a full 7%, so 14% of my salary is invested in retirement).

These increases WILL make my paychecks smaller (obviously), but I’ve already adjusted my budget accordingly. It doesn’t hurt that I’m also expecting another raise on the near(ish) horizon.

Debt

In my Review of 2023 post, the big thing was that I paid off my car in October and officially entered 2024 consumer debt-free. My only remaining debts are my student loans and my mortgage.

The debt plan for 2024 is to basically continue with how things were going in the past. We will continue to pay double mortgage payments twice/year and make the minimum payments on my student loans, riding them out the next two years until they’re forgiven through PSLF.

Travel

Travel continues to be a big priority for us. In 2024 we have one big trip planned (husband and I going to Italy in summer!). In the Fall I’ll have a sabbatical from work so I hope to do a couple of quick weekend trips during that time, too. I’m tentatively planning one with just me and the kids, and then one with me and my mom. No destinations in mind yet, but it’s fun to start thinking about (and saving up for) our upcoming adventures.

Did you set financial goals for 2024? If so, what do they entail?

Ashley

Hi, I’m Ashley! Arizonan on paper, Texan at heart. Lover of running, blogging, and all things cheeeeese. Freshly 40, married mother of two, working in academia. Trying to finally (finally!) pay off that ridiculous 6-digit student loan debt!