March Total Income:
I ended up skipping last month’s update, had a lot going on. I honestly was debating whether or not to continue on with this blog. We reached a lot of milestones and now seem to get more trolls as we move along our financial journey. I did get some encouragement online about continuing to post so I’ve decided to continue on for now.
No major changes to our income this month, I continue to work part time emergency medicine with 8-10 clinical shifts a month and then supplement my income with telemedicine work. Thus far, I am very happy with the change and feel it is much more sustainable in the long run than full time clinical emergency medicine. My wife continues to work part time in the hospital as well.
Now, on to the big news for this month, we received a gift from my wife’s parents of $260,000. We had a lot of discussion on what to do with this gift, ultimately, we decide to pay down our 3.75% mortgage (mortgage was $750k $490k). While I fully acknowledge we could have put that money in the stock market and likely done much better, we didn’t. A few reasons
- The money was a gift from my wife’s parents after they sold their primary home and downsized to a condo. We received a portion of that money from the house sale. The house was my wife’s childhood home. My wife’s parents both came to America as immigrants with nothing. They worked hard and achieved in American dream. In fact, her father (who worked in construction) spent 2 years building the home himself. We felt in someways, it was a tribute to them to transfer the money into our house.
- We have built a nice nest egg for our late 30s (+/- $2.5mil invested in the stock market) and felt it was reasonable to take some risk of the table with a large paydown of our debt.
- Our state has homestead protection, thus no one can come after our house/home equity so there is some asset protection.
- Recast – We applied to recast our mortgage. The payment will drop from $3800 ~$2400 (do not have final numbers yet). In case one of us loses our job, it lowers our monthly fixed costs. Of course, we will always have the option to pay more if we desire.
- We saved $285k in interest over the course of the loan (see numbers below):
Would you have done the same?
Next, I also received a large tax refund of just over $40,000. I did have a discussion with my CPA about it, overestimated capital gain taxes (had some tax loss harvesting from the previous year) resulting in a large refund. I immediately deployed this month into my defined benefit plan as I continue to aggressively fund all of our retirement accounts for the year even as we’ve had a big market pullback.
Expenses
I continue to be surprised with how expensive life seems to have gotten within the past few years. We continue to have (thankfully) minor maintenance issues with our cars, house, boat, etc and always seem to have extra unexpected bills each month. Our monthly credit card expenses are now routinely over $5k. Regardless, we haven’t had any major expenses this year so we are still counting our blessings.
Investments
Ouch, it has been a tough start to the year. Empower shows us down about 10% for the year although we got a little boost back up at the end of the month. Regardless, we continue to invest every extra dollar we can.
$163k we have invested into various tax protected accounts this year. Again, some of this money was extra cash we had leftover from the year prior and I also put my $40k tax refund into my defined benefit plan giving us a nice boost to get that maxed for the year. Next month, I am planning to max the DB plan ($7k more) and then also add $10k to my son’s 529 plan. After that, I will start saving up our funds for taxes (usually try to have around $100k cash by the end of the year as I file as an S-corp with a single payroll in December allowing me to pay my tax bill at the end of year).
Investment Accounts:
Ouch, hard to see our investments down so much, but we continue along and know it will grow in the long term.
My Financial Goals for 2026
- Hit $3 million in investments: We are currently at the $2.5 mil range, contributions continue to go in every month, need some growth in the market to achieve this goal.
- ?Pay down mortgage and recast – In process
- Obtain umbrella insurance – Done! We finally obtained a $1 mil policy.
-AMJ