I wrote the “” page almost three years ago and haven’t really updated it. I think now it is a good time to address what I have written and what has happened so far.

This is the old Goals page:

“My goals are quite simple — have at least one child and retire early. However, to do this I would need to save up a quite sizable retirement fund for myself and a fairly large college fund for my child. The pursuit to pass down my genes has a huge financial responsibility attached to it since once I have a child my pay may decrease quite significantly. I have seen many working mothers discriminated against in a silent but egregious manner, but if I get started on that topic I will have to fill up another page. So my short term goal is to save enough money to have a child without having to worry about paycuts or unemployment. I want to have my first child before I am 28, so that leaves me only three more years to save. If my husband and I don’t purchase an overpriced home and continue to rent, it’s possible to reach our goal of $500000 by 6/30/2010.”

So it is almost 6/30/2010, and no, we do not have $500,000. We might have made it if the stock market did not fall off a cliff, but the damage to our portfolios wasn’t extremely severe because we pulled out a good chunk of cash before the September/October 2008 crash to purchase the hubby’s parents’ house in Southern California.  Basically before the huge crash happened we had something like 40% of our portfolio in cash.   Our portfolios did go down, but it wasn’t as ugly as it could have been.

We plan to move there if the hubby gets a job nearby the house, but the recession sort of kept us where we are for the last couple years. The house is a bit too big for the two of us, but we did have a son last year and if we have one more child it would still be a very roomy house. Basically right now the hubby wants to just move one more time to that house and live in it until we retire.   The mortgage on the house is a couple hundred dollars more than our current rent and with the mortgage interest deduction it is less than our rent.  All in all, it was a good purchase and we don’t regret it.   Even if we had to sell it now we still have a good chunk of equity in it since we technically bought it at a low price along with the hubby’s parents’ gift of equity.

Being a working mom is very tough, but to be honest after having a child I really don’t care about paycuts and the possibility of unemployment anymore.  I have discovered that it is not really that hard to make money if I wanted to, and although my current job is pretty great, I am not afraid of losing it because a job is just a job and my life would not be over if I didn’t have a job.  As long as I have my family  and my wits about meI would be okay.

The ultimate goal is still to retire early, and now the hubby is on board with that goal and we have set the date of our financial independence to be our son’s 10th birthday.  We plan to pay off our home by then and have enough investments to generate around $3000 to $4000 per month.  So right now our son is 8 months old, and we have 9 years and 4 months left to achieve that goal.  I will probably update the Goals page in another three years.  Needless to say, a lot of things I didn’t expect to happen happened in the last few years, and I expect the future to be equally surprising.

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