I changed my mind. We will not be fully contributing to our 401K as of January. I've thought this out, I swear!
HR re-sent the paperwork (I can enroll now, but they destroyed my paperwork 2 days ago, awesome). I looked at the quarter dates, and looked at the calendar, and realized that there would only be one paycheck in between my anniversary date and the second quarter start. In other words, only one paycheck with the match on 6%. I'm already enrolled in the 401K program (contributing 2%) so it's not like I'm not saving for retirement.
Anyway, here's why I decided to change. As I mentioned, we'll be hitting 4 digits in savings this month. Yuck. I think we actually have more in our retirement savings than we do in our savings account. And that worries me. It's not that I don't feel that we should be saving for retirement... I had too many people tell me when I graduated from college that they wished they'd started saving earlier for retirement so they weren't scrambling as it got closer. But I don't like the fact that if we have car trouble, if one of our pets has an accident, or if one of us makes a math error in the checkbook (that was a fun recent experience) we're screwed. We need to have savings we can use if we need, not wait 40 years to touch.
I want to have at least 10K saved up before having a baby, and at our current savings rates, that will push back our current plans by four years. FOUR YEARS. That's not ok. So if putting that 4% into my 401K isn't the best way to save it this quarter (and I don't believe it is) I want to put it into our savings. Hence, this goal won't be completed until at earliest, April 1. But I'm at peace with that.
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