Tag: retire early

A Thanksgiving Checklist

There are many reasons to be thankful this Thanksgiving. I am thankful to have a loving family, and my health to be able to support them, be with them and enjoy my life near them. Every year there are a few items that I go over to make sure my family and I are in the best shape either financially, physically and emotionally. This list might help you

  • Retirement and investments:
    • Tax advantaged accounts:
      • Max out 401K
      • Perform a Roth IRA backdoor 
      • Max out your HSA
    • Rebalance
    • Do a financial checkup and review your credit reports
    • Evaluate your debt (student loan, mortgage, credit card), If your APR is larger than 3% pay them off 
  • Insurance: Make sure all of your insurances are in place to protect your assets
    • Insurances for home (homeowner or renter)
    • Car insurance (do you need that full coverage or can you downgrade to a great liability insurance)
    • Life insurance (You don’t need to set your life insurance to 10X of your salary, as long as your life insurance covers your liabilities like mortgage and gets you 2X or 3X your income you are in a great shape)
  • Will and Estate Planning :
    • Check your beneficiaries on all of your individual accounts , add your spouse to all accounts as the beneficiary and make sure you have contingent and secondary beneficiaries
    • Review your will and make sure it is up to date, maybe set up a living trust, a document for your end of life decision and power of attorney 
  • Donate: it is thanks giving after all 
  • Do micro optimization:
    • Check your emergency fund, is it too large?
    • do you have an automated dollar cost averaging strategy
    • is your HSA allocation correct?
    • Review your account reports and see if there is any item you don’t recognize.
    • Reduce your bills, 
  • Tax Planning:
    • Put together TAX documents and a file 
    • Talk to your tax preparer 
  • Budgetting:
    • Increase your budget for travel 
  • Health and mental health
    • Schedule your annual physical, dental cleaning and checkup, eye exam, lab work, fitness test
    • Sign up for a gym if you don’t have one
    • Mental health: what is your hobby this year? what classes are you taking?

Why you should automate your HSA investment

We talked about HSA accounts and why you should have one. If you still need more convincing you can look into my other post “What is an HSA anyways“.

When it comes to investing, automation is your best bet. You should automate your investment so 1) you cannot fiddle with it too much and as a result get a better return, that’s why dead investors often outperform active investors. 2) you want to spend your precious time on family or on yourself, you shouldn’t constantly be on a call with Vanguard or some other bank.

My HSA used to be a mess. Every two weeks I had to log into my account, rebalance, and move my excess money to the investment part of my account. It took me a few months to realize that my bank can automatically take any new deposits from my employer and transfer them to my pre-determined diversified portfolio.

If you have not done this yet, you should stop what you are doing, log into your HSA account and automate investments.