Greetings and welcome! Thanks for clicking through!

Flexo just linked me in a post about throwing money away from your employer. I’ve got golden handcuffs as well, if I want to stay for the 2009 bonus season, which is awfully tempting.

Thanks to Flexo, I didn’t realize that I’d saved about $17K over the last 18 or so months. That does sound pretty good!

As a trained social scientist, I’ve still got some more footnotes to the information presented, which I left in a comment on Flexo’s blog. I’m sorry if I’m repeating myself here, but I am only human and the things I did to get to this point are things that anyone can do. I truly believe that.

#1 – When possible, I tried to max out my contributions to 20% of my salary. I have had to cut that back at times. Right now, I’m contributing 17%.

#2 – Generous company matching. It’s pretty standard, 50% of the first 5% of salary, which is about what I got at my old company.

#3 – Rockin’ the salary negotiations at the outset when I got hired. There’s no way I’d be doing this great without that as the cornerstone. Then I got a raise, based on the same principles.

#4 – Very aggressive investing. It’s all stock funds. There’s another post on the blog about ROI. I think my worst return over last year was still double digits.

#5 – My company lets me contribute part of my annual bonus to the 401k. My old company didn’t do that. It’s money that never hit my bank account and I never saw it. This is definitely going to help me max out to $15.5K (or very close) despite putting only 17% of each paycheck right now.

One final note is that my 401k plan administrator finally changed their hideous website and it’s a wee bit better than before. It’s a lot stickier and more useful, but still stinky compared to some other sites.