CalorieCents

In my about page, I stated I am an inactive CPA in the State of New York. I am pretty good at auditing but have no professional tax experience. You can ask your other CPA friends what I mean. I think it’s funny when many people assume CPAs must be experts in tax planning. It’s just not true. Most CPAs I know are audit experts. Not to say that there aren’t CPAs that are tax preparers and planners. Usually a CPA who makes it his business to know taxes is a tax professional. I am NOT one of those.

As you can see in my debt scales, Mrs. Moonimus and I are about $40,000 in debt not including our mortgage. I thought about adding the mortgage to the debt scale but decided to exclude it. This is partly due to the fact that we are using the Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover as our financial plan. Most of you familiar with the plan knows that we first start with $1,000 Emergency Fund and then attack our non-mortgage related debt. As you can see the lion’s share of the debt is a student loan. This was for Mrs. Moonimus’ grad school loans. The only thing is this loan has an absurdly low 2.375% interest rate. I’m not sure if I want to attack that debt. How would you guys handle that?

Our baby was born this past May and she is awesome! However, we decided that Mrs. Moonimus would stop working to raise our baby which caused a big shortfall in our income. I quickly changed jobs soon after, got myself a raise and better benefits and we are getting by on my salary alone. Recently, my wife started tutoring some kids in the neighborhood (she is a teacher) and so we get some extra income that way. The last two years, we were phased out of the Roth IRA but 2008 we should be ok to make contributions. If we follow the Money Makeover plan, we’d have to build the emergency fund to cover 3 - 6 months of expenses and then think about contributing for retirement. My company requires a 2% contribution into a defined contribution plan and then has an extremely generous matching program. The match is great since it provides us with more flexibility with our money.

So far our goals for this year is to save $1,000, pay our credit card and personal debts, and maybe pay off half of the student loan though I’m still unsure about this. Also I’d like to see if we could increase our net worth 12% though I haven’t looked at those numbers very closely.