I had some lofty goals for 2022. We wanted to max our Roth IRA, save for a move, and pad our emergency fund. That was difficult to do on a single salary in Northern California. Here’s a breakdown of our financial goals last year and whether or not we met them.

Maxing out our Roth IRA⌗

My spouse and I both have a Roth IRA account. The maximum limit for each IRA was $6000. I took out money from our emergency fund to put $12000 total into our Roth IRA early in the year due to the market declining. But, that wasn’t the best idea as we were left with a small emergency fund that needed to be padded back up. And the market kept declining so I learned that I wasn’t good at timing the market (who would’ve thought). So, I won’t be lump summing the max amount into our Roth any time soon. I’d rather just contribute a smaller amount each month to meet the max.

Building up our emergency fund (again)⌗

Because of my stupidity above, our emergency fund depleted by $12000. I needed to build it back up to 6 months of emergency reserve. This was difficult to do since we were also saving up for a move across the country for my new job. I was finally able to meet this goal by the end of December, and now we have good amount saved up for our emergency fund.

Saving for a home downpayment⌗

I had the lofty goal of saving for our home downpayment. We started with nothing at the beginning of the year and ended with about $900 at the end of the year in this goal. So we didn’t do that well. I would like to save between 3 to 5% for our home downpayment in the next two years.

Saving for our move and new furniture⌗

I wrote about our move a while back. That was expensive. Mostly because we had to finance the move out of pocket as I was getting a relocation bonus from work. But that wasn’t until my first paycheck in November, and we were moving at the end of September. We were able to mostly stay under budget, although inflation, high gas prices, and higher rent than anticipated were hitting us left and right. Luckily we didn’t have to get in any debt to finance the move.

Immigration fees⌗

We’ve been working on getting our green card since 2021. In 2022, we hired our previous immigration lawyer to help us adjust our status and get our employment authorization documents. The lawyer fees were about $2500 and we also had to pay about $2500 to USCIS in fees. Immigration is not cheap, but it was a necessary expense for us.

Maxing out our 401(k)⌗

Nope, this didn’t happen at all. I only contributed enough to get the match at my previous employer. After a raise, I increased it to 10%. But that was definitely not enough to max out this account. It was basically impossible to do on a single salary in Northern California. Our rent payment was almost 50% of our net income! That was one of the reasons we left California. The cost of living was too high and with inflation, it has gotten even worse.

Conclusion⌗

No, we didn’t meet all our financial goals. The 401(k) didn’t get maxed out, but we did max out our Roth. With the market conditions, our investment accounts haven’t gone up, even though we did contribute to these accounts. And with the move and immigration fees, our net worth hasn’t gone up much in 2022. In total, I estimate that we had about a 3.7% increase in net worth in 2022. But, I consider that a win, given the inflation, market conditions, and the large expenses we were faced with.

So tell me, what financial goals do you have and did you meet any of them?