Update on Traditional IRA

Bought FFNOX! Thanks to Joe for encouraging me to look away from Precious Metals Mutual Funds. I am pretty sure it is not right for me right now.

A Comparison of FSAGX, FRESX and FSMAX Returns

After yesterday’s post and joe’s comment, we thought we were probably missing something. So we went and looked at the annual return on the three mutual funds we were considering to buy – FSAGX (Fidelity Select Gold), FRESX(Fidelity Real Estate Investment) and FSMAX(Fidelity Spartan 500 Index Advantage).

Are we missing something here if we still want to pick FSAGX for our investment? Are we overlooking a basic flaw in our judgement?

What has been happening?

I have nothing interesting happening in my personal life. All is well and we are focusing on paying the money we borrowed from our parents for our house down-payment. We have paid back about $10,000 in the past 4 months. And looking to pay off the rest in the next couple of months.

Once that is done, we need to reevaluate whether our next priority would be to increase our emergency fund or pay down the car loan or the second mortgage.

We are in the process of funding the 2007 IRA this week and file our taxes after that. This was the first year I did the taxes. We used turbotax and it made my life easier. We were initially not planning on opening an IRA this year but after looking at how much we owed the IRS, we decided that it would be a good idea to open a traditional IRA to bring our tax down.

I would be talking with BB about how we would be investing the money in our traditional IRA. We opened an account with Fidelity and we are interested in buying mutual funds that invest in REIT or Gold. We were initally thinking about buying index funds, but since most of BB’s 401k is invested in index funds, we wanted to diversify a little and be adventurous. I will update you on what we did after we invest the money.

Today, BB called up and asked me if we could buy that LCD flat panel tv that he has been longing to buy. I told him that we did not have money to buy it and since then I have been thinking about that sentence. 4 months back I wouldn’t have thought like that. What a difference it makes to be so close to your accounts? It really opens up a lot of things we took for granted. We have never been in too much credit card debt, too much being in 10s of thousands of dollars. BB completed graduate school without incurring any debt. BB supported me throughout my graduate school and when I completed we still did not have any student loans. Thanks to our parents who supported us during our undergraduate degree. The debt we have now is about 1k in credit card(0% interest rate until September 2008), 8k to parents, 17k in car loan(@6.55%) and a mortgage. We live(including mortgage) off of BB’s income and use my income towards other debt repayment. I feel bad to tell BB that we can’t buy the tv now. But we should seriously considering buying it once we pay off our parents money.

Is it okay to indulge in something that you have wanted for long. This tv thing has been going on for the past 6 months atleast. When is it okay to indulge? 

Networth and Budget Updates

It’s been a late update. But here it goes.

The crux of the update is that it looks bad. It is actually not bad. There were some unexpected work related expenses for which the reimbursements would probably come in March. So hopefully I will be able to account for this drastic looking failure in March and get back to normal course. In the mean time, hang on!!!

Gas consumption was less. It was because my husband is out of town and didn’t use his car for about 15 days during february. Gifts was overspent. We bought a music system for our house. I can’t believe we had none so far. So no complaints there. We paid the rest of the car insurance in whole. So we don’t have to pay in March. So that is a normal expense. Misc 1 is discretionary spending for me. I have to stop going to craft stores. Utilities is overspent too. It’s because of the overseas calls that I have been making to talk to BB (Let’s call my husband that from now on).

As for as the networth update, the numbers don’t look good because of the unexpected work related expense. But I have not modified the goals for march. It is based on the assumption that we would get the refunds this month.

Hiatus!!

I won’t be updating my blog for another 10 days. See you guys in a bit!!!