Entries Tagged 'Retirement' ↓

Even though this is old news, I couldn’t believe what I read.  A company in Oak Park called Chicago Spectro Service Laboratory Inc. created phony statements every year and lied about the contributions they made to their employees’ profit sharing plan.  The result is that an engineer who worked for them for 30 years found out that instead of $200,000 he had nothing in his retirement fund. The engineer had to endure five years of litigation to get a settlement that paid him $3000 a month.  Apparently theft from 401ks and other pension plans is quite common in small companies where the plans are not audited. So what can you do about it?

1. Check your statements – Obviously, when your company actually fakes the statements this would not help.  However, you can still check for irregularities.  For example, does the contribution on the statement match what is deducted on your paycheck?  Some companies steal money by withholding your contributions.  Basically, they deduct the money from your check and never deposit it.

2. Know how much you are supposed to have – No matter what you invest in for your retirement plans, you should know approximately how much you have.  It could fluctuate according to the market, but any fluctuations that are larger than normal should be looked at.  It could be possible that your company withdrew money from your account.

3. Make sure your money is invested on time – Some shady companies do deposit their employees’ money, but they do it very slowly and collect the float on the money they take.  By law your money should be deposited into your account by the 15th of the month following the deduction.  Federal regulators are thinking of shortening this deposit period to seven days after the deduction because too many companies are waiting until the last minute and shafting their employees.

4. Check that your investment instructions are carried out - A recent case where an employee sued his company for mismanaging his 401k is due to the company’s negligence in carrying out his instructions to move his investments.  This kind of incompetence is pretty common, and you have to check that your retirement plan administrator follows your instructions through statements and paystubs.  For example, my hubby had to bug his HR repeatedly to get his 401k contribution percentage changed. The process should have taken just one or two paycycles, but instead it took about 3 months because his HR just neglected his request.

5. Take your money and run – It seems that quite a few companies raided their employees’ 401ks due to their own financial troubles.  If it seems that your company is dying out, it might be best to leave the company and take your money with you in a rollover IRA.  You have more control of your money with your own IRA and you have more investment options.

The good news is that most companies with more than 100 employees generally have their retirement programs audited yearly.  If your account is in a reputable financial firm such as Fidelity or Vanguard you also have less to worry about because these financial firms will do a lot to protect their own reputations. It is a shame that some employers would betray the trust of their employees and raid their nest eggs, but stealing and embezzlement is against the law  and if you discover such illegal activity you should blow the whistle for the good of your retirement.

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So we finally finished doing our taxes for the year of 2007. Since it was the first year for us to do taxes together it was a little more annoying than usual. Things used to be as easy as taking the standard deduction and reporting my W-2s and investment income. This year I had to read a lot more about filing as a married couple and the various marriage penalties. There were a few things we could have done to reduce our taxes. For example, I told the hubby to increase his 401k contributions last year, and he did do it, but his company seems to not have updated his contributions percentage. Since we didn’t get married until end of August last year I never looked at his paychecks for most of the year. It seems that financial planning for engaged couples really should start at the beginning of the year they intend to marry because the tax status is based on their marital statuses at the end of the year. By the time I got the hubby’s W-2 for last year it was too late to contribute more to his 401k for 2007. Another thing is that our W-4 status was wrong for most of last year because we didn’t change it. I don’t think that affected our taxes so much, though.

The end result is that we owe money this year simply because we got married. Both of us were bumped into the next tax bracket due to the marriage penalty. If we were both single we would both get tax refunds this year. However, we did donate a good amount of money so the tax bite isn’t so bad, and we don’t have a problem paying it off. This year, we are putting the following plans in action to reduce our taxes:

1. Got the hubby’s HR to up his 401k contributions - The hubby contacted his HR and now his 401k contributions are at the same level as mine. Last year I saved a lot more than him in my 401k and it is only fair that he gets to save as much in his own retirement account. This move reduces our combined adjusted gross income, and it means we will pay less taxes as a couple.

2. Donate more money - We are upping our donations each month to our church and charities because we have been blessed financially and we want to give a bit more out. I rather see the money go to causes I care about than the IRS or the Franchise Tax Board. Some people said to me that it is a dumb plan because I don’t really save money by giving money out, but donating isn’t about saving money.

3. Put more in tax advantaged funds and bonds – Treasury bonds do not incur California state tax and the Vanguard California Tax exempt money market fund is exempt from both Federal and State taxes. I am already putting money into these funds, and I plan to add some more. This is in our joint account and we can use the money for a house in the next couple years.

4. Maybe have a kid? – Our plan is to have a kid two years after we get married, and though a kid would reduce taxes he or she would increase our expenses quite a bit, too. We can’t really control the exact time of conceiving, but hopefully it will happen in a year or two.  I am reading up on this quite a bit.  I think it is best for us to have a kid sooner rather than later because each year the cost of having children goes up.  Also, I think the hubby’s mom is so lucky to have two adult children out of the house at the age of 46!  I want to be a young empty nester in twenty years.

The funny thing is, we still qualify for the economic stimulus tax rebate this year, but it is just enough to cover the taxes we owe so we will come out even.  Since we owe taxes I am trying to write the checks as late as possible and send out the returns in April.   Hopefully this year we will not owe anything!

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Today I opened a Roth IRA account at Vanguard for the hubby and fully funded it for 2007. Why so late you ask? Well, the hubby never ever had a Roth IRA account and since we got married last year I wasn’t sure if we were low income enough to contribute to a Roth IRA. The Roth IRA is one area where you can clearly see the marriage penalty. A single filer can contribute the full amount to a Roth IRA when he or she makes less than $99,000, but a married couple can only contribute the full amount if they make less than $156,000. I am not quite sure why it is structured this way because it seems to be saying that married people should get less tax advantaged accounts?

Basically I was afraid that we weren’t eligible to contribute any longer. However, after tallying up our income and donations our adjusted gross income was just a bit under the limit and I signed the hubby up and funded the account from our joint account. Right now I just parked his money in Vanguard Target Retirement 2045, but that could be changed in the future.

Looking back, I guess it is good that I had to wait a bit to open and fund this account because the market went down quite a bit. If we had opened the account back in the end of August when we got married then the money would have diminished quite a bit. Then again, it doesn’t matter that much because we plan to hold the funds for 34 to 35 years.

I really like Roth IRAs because they give us the option of taking out our contributions, and there are no taxes on the earnings in the future. I have had one since college and funded it faithfully every single year. The hubby just turned 25 recently so he can start withdrawing the money in 34.5 years, and I am sure these years will pass faster than we think.

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So I haven’t written that much this week because I started a new job on Wednesday. So far it’s been going really well. I like my new coworkers very much and one of the company founders went to the same college as me. Well, actually a lot of my new coworkers are my former college classmates so it is actually quite fun. With this new job comes some new changes that I will write about in the coming months. For example, I will transfer out of my crappy former 401k that I described in this post. My new employer’s 401k program is through Fidelity once again, and so I am a happy camper and I can roll all my 401k money into one place. Additionally, I have set up my direct deposit to deposit straight into my Vanguard money market account because I never really use my checking account except to funnel money. Vanguard’s direct deposit set up is actually quite cool and you can deposit your paycheck into any number of funds. Finally, I will need to make a decision on whether or not to exercise my vested options at my ex-employer. I do still have about 3 months to exercise my options and I am thinking of doing it in January so that in case I do trigger the AMT I would have to pay it in 2009 instead of 2008. By then, perhaps my old employer would go public (Hah! I wish). At this point, I think the options at my old employer is still worth exercising even though private stock is an illiquid asset. Besides those things, my pay schedule is now synced up with my hubby’s so monthly financial updates should be easier to manage. At my old company I got paid on the 7th and 22nd while he got paid on the 15th and end of the month. So that difference in pay schedule forced me to check our bank accounts every week.

Anyway, I think the hardest part about a new job is really just the first month. After that I can usually get into a regular schedule and comfortably finish my work. Right now I’m trying to get used to the fact that people on my team come to work even later than I do. On Friday I went to work at 11am and I was the first one there. I also got the last cube available in the entire office space and so I’m in the middle of a bunch of boxes and next to the IT lady who talks on the phone all the time about her kid and grandmother. However, that is all going to change soon because the entire company is moving to San Mateo in two weeks. I am looking forward to sitting close to my team and getting a newer office space. It is also ironic because I just left a job in San Mateo and I’m going to move right back. I will definitely see a lot of my old cohorts hanging around downtown San Mateo during lunch. It should be fun because I will get to introduce my new coworkers to the lunch spots I am already very familiar with and still keep up with the gossip of the old office.

On a purely monetary standpoint I am pretty sure that I would have had a higher salary in the next few months if I just stayed at my old company and gotten my yearly review. However, I felt like it was time to learn something new and move on to a younger company. The VP at my old company also tried to convince me that my stock options may be worth a lot even though I have very few shares. That may or may not be true, and I do agree with the VP that the company should do very well in the future. However, I think my current company has a lot more potential because it is younger and makes a great product. I really see stock options as a “possible bonus”, and I don’t count on them to make me rich. I just feel like I have to move on to stay competitive in the field of software engineering. I am really afraid of becoming one of those people that I interviewed who had 8 years of experience and didn’t know the basics.

So that’s what’s happening in my life, and I am pretty excited to do all of these new things.

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The original text of this post is preserved elsewhere. I didn’t expect this but my parents went PSYCHO over the post and spammed this blog with crazy comments and flooded my cellphone with messages. They went as far as phoning my husband at work about it. I didn’t write anything bad about them, but I think the post really hit a nerve because I wrote about the reality of the real estate bubble and how they were affected by it. I really don’t understand why they are always bragging about what they have and at the same time they are afraid to face the truth. What annoys me the most is that they’re still preaching that real estate is a great investment to me using the numbers of years past and that isn’t realistic at all. I wrote the post because I thought it was a pretty interesting story that I lived through personally and I didn’t mean to offend anyone. I also wanted to put the story out there to show that once upon a time houses in the Bay Area were affordable and it made sense to buy. My parents’ objection isn’t that I wrote about the truth, but that I wrote their story. Maybe it’s the Chinese custom of “saving face” that I violated, but I believe that I shared the information quite anonymously. I hope that they realize noone really knows who they are except for themselves. I guess I am still quite in shock that they reacted this way because a lot of bloggers write about the good and bad in their lives. Also, I didn’t react as crazily as they did when my dad plagiarized multiple articles from this blog and posted them on his blog without crediting me as the author. I really think the entire point of blogging is that we learn from personal stories like the one I wrote. For those of you who read the original story, would you say that I revealed too much? Do you think that the story was mean-spirited in any way? Comments are definitely appreciated on this matter.

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