June 2009 Weddings
Lucy Elizabeth 10.27.12
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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Nosy financial poll (clicky)
This may be interesting since though we come from different geographic areas, careers, and ages, we are all recent newlyweds and some of us may be trying to figure out this whole financial planning thing now that two incomes are involved.
Discussion is welcome of course. 
Lucy Elizabeth 10.27.12
Re: Nosy financial poll (clicky)
We have between 5 and 10k saved up, set aside specifically to stay as our nest egg. We have other money on hand, but it's for vacations and things we just want to buy, or work on the house.
The money we set into savings is in case one of us gets laid off, or something really bad happens with the house. We have enough to pay 3-4 months of all of our bills, and it would last longer than that since if we lost a job, unemployment would take care of us for 3months, maybe longer with the extensions the government keeps granting.
I feel like I have a lot of money in savings. I've been working since I was 16 and I've saved a lot of the money I earned. I have a savings account for my own personal use, and I also have a money market account with a high interest rate that my dad set up when I was 16 that I've been making deposits to for the past 9 years. I don't use that money right now, but I plan on using it for a down payment on a house in the near future.
And I was very fortunate that I didn't have to pay for my college or my wedding so that helped me save a lot of money.
Lucy Elizabeth 10.27.12
We're way down from where we'd like to be. Wedding drained our savings. Its being built back up, but will likely get drained again in 2010 as I'm facing a stretch of potential unemployment. Feels like we're treading water in terms of saving money...get ahead and then get another set back.
ETA: I do have $$ going in each paycheck towards retirement. Have had that for a decade now. Its amazing how much its grown since I first began it...even with the market crash. DH will get retirement money from his job monthly once he gets past the 20 year mark.
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We have a good amount of money in retirement and investments, but we don't have nearly as much as we would like to have in savings. Right now were putting money into savings and once we save up enough, we pay off one of our credit cards. We are paying 2 of them off this month, so now we just have my monster left to tackle. Hopefully it will be gone in 6 months then we'll be able to dump over $1500 into savings a month.
It's a stupid way to pay them off, but without putting money away every month it won't happen as fast as we'd like. If one of us got laid off we'd be screwed I think. We both wait tables in addition to our full time jobs, so the thought is, if we got laid off, we'd probably pick up more hours doing that for the time being until we could find something.
This. We have nonliquid investments for a house (CDs, etc.) but right now our focus is paying down other debt and building our credit rating. Between the wedding and DH being out of work for a month last year, it pretty much cleaned out our savings. When he took a lower paying job, it made it more difficult to rebuild the savings so we are making debt our priority.
We have a decent amount (for our age) in retirement accounts and such, but our cash savings/investments are not that high. We are done paying off CC's though and almost caught up from wedding stuff, so saving is the priority now!
I work in finance and investing, but its amazing how hard it can be to apply what you know in your head to your own finances.
Our savings account is embarrassing. Between funding the wedding, and our recent move that cost thousands more than we anticipated, our savings are completely depleted. We only have around $1,000 in a savings account right now. Luckily, DH is military and won't lose his job and my job is 100% secure. Plus, we both make good salaries so we're able to build our savings back up to a safe amount pretty quickly. I'm hoping to have a 3 month cushion built back up very soon.
We're not completely irresponsible though. In light of my recent freak outs about our liquid assets, I checked on our retirement accounts just last week was pretty blown away by how much has accumulated since I last checked.
M and I were just talking about this. We paid for about 2/3 of the wedding so we have to start saving again. For awhile we were putting 1k a month into savings and haven't been back on this track since the wedding.
We also have not combined our money yet. I think when we decide to have kids that we'll rely on the joint acct. Right now we just have a joint CC and each pay 1/2 of the bill.
We have $3 in our savings account. I win this fail.
To our defense, we're pretty young. I JUST graduated, and I'm in multimedia which isn't exactly lucrative to start out with. And DH needs to return to school for 2 more years so he can get a mediocre entry level graphic design position.
We're getting there, though. Paying off debt that can't wait, and figuring out a savings plan.
We're in the $10 - 20k liquid range... In the last 3 years we've paid off about $12k in CC debt and about $10k for the wedding last year but have also been really trying to get our savings built up too. We paid off the final CC bill just last month and it feels so good to not have it there anymore. DH's car will be paid off by February as well so then we will only owe on the house and I have a car lease. We are trying to save up enough to be able to put 20% down on our next house and keep a 3-4 month cushion in our savings. I'm hoping that with both of our bonuses this spring and the equity I think we have in our house (so long as the market doesnt get worse and we can sell relatively quickly) this will work out.
I've been really good about putting money into retirement accounts through work and DH has done well but has changed jobs more often than I have so had to go through a couple stretches of waiting periods, plus he just makes way less money so our 401k's are good but not so balanced. After we buy our next place and get things squared away, I would like to start contributing to a Roth while we are under the AGI targets too.
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