Should I reduce my 401(K) Contributions to Save for a House? – Money Q&A

Transcript:

On this episode of the personal finance podcast, should I reduce my 401k contributions to save for a house?

What's up everybody. And welcome to the personal finance podcast. I'm your host, Andrew founder of master money. co and this week on the personal finance podcast, should I reduce my 401k contributions? If you guys want to send in any of your questions on a money Q and a episode, make sure you join the master money newsletter by going to master money.

co slash newsletter. And don't forget to follow us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or YouTube, or whatever podcast player you love listening to this podcast on. And if you're getting value out of the show, consider. a five star rating and review on Apple podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. Now today on this episode of money Q and a, we are going to be diving into four different questions.

Now, if you've never heard our money Q and a episodes, the listeners send questions in and we answer their money struggles that they are struggling with. So the first question is going to be, should I reduce my 401k contributions to save money? For a house. And then we're going to dive into that situation.

Question two is how do I find my old 401k? This person actually lost access to their old 401k. We're going to give them a bunch of different ways that they can search and track down their old 401k question three, how do I pay off debt step by step? So this person is asking for a step by step plan because they have a certain amount of debt and they want me to give them that step by step plan on how you can Actionably, uh, go after and take down that debt.

And then question four is one third of the U S populations. Background info is now public. We're going to talk through what happened there and why it is important and what you can do about that as well. So that is a, a new data breach that happened again. I mean, these things are just, it seems like they're happening all the time.

We're going to dive into that as well in question four. So we have an action packed episode here, so let's get into it. All right. The first question is hi, I'm currently saving 15 percent of my income. toward my Roth 401k. I also max out my Roth IRA and HSA. Amazing job that you're doing all of that. I'm trying to save towards a down payment for a house.

I was thinking that I would lower my 401k contribution to 10 percent and use the additional 5 percent towards saving for a house down payment. Is this a good approach or should I be cutting back from other areas to save for that house? down payment. So this is a fantastic question. And first of all, congratulations for putting 15 percent of your income towards your Roth 401k and maxing out your Roth IRA and HSA.

That is an incredible job thus far. And because you are doing that, This is definitely something that you can weigh as you can be looking into buying a house. You're starting to hit those retirement goals. So one thing I would say first is to note, Hey, am I hitting my retirement goals? Am I on pace to reach retirement based on the amount that I'm saving?

Most likely you are in most financial situations, but first you want to make sure that you are running that math to ensure that you are on pace. Pace for retirement. Now, secondly, what I would say is because you are doing these other things, this gives you the right to even run these calculations to make sure you're on pace.

And so let's think about this for a second, because the first thing that I would definitely be doing is I would be considering total cost of ownership. So if you never heard our episodes talking about total cost of ownership, what we talk about here is you need to do the math before you start to save for your down payment on a house.

And, or. Do the math to make sure that this is a financial purchase that you actually want to do. We have something called the total cost of ownership calculator. It's completely free. You can get it on mastermoney. co slash resources. And it's basically a spreadsheet that takes you through a bunch of different steps to figure out if buying a house in your specific location makes sense or not.

And what this does is it'll go through. And give you the scenario of total cost of ownership. And what that means is it's not just buying a house, but in addition, it's making sure that you are accounting for a ton of different things like taxes, insurance, but also maintenance maintenance items are so incredibly expensive that you got to make sure that you are accounting for those as an expense.

Most people don't, and that's where they get themselves into trouble when buying a house. And so the total cost of ownership calculator allows you to look into, Hey, When I buy this house, does it actually make financial sense for me to even do this? And a lot of areas across the country, because of interest rates, because of the cost of buying a house, it makes a lot less sense to buy a house than it does to actually rent a house.

And if you run the math. If you are arguing back in your head right now, you're screaming in your car or in your cubicle saying, no, you should always buy a house. It's the American dream. It's a great investment. Guess what? Newsflash. It is not a great investment every single time. And if you don't do the math on one of the biggest purchases of your life, you are doing yourself a massive, massive disservice.

I am absolutely amazed at how many people in this country think that buying a house is the way to wealth. If the majority of your net worth is in In your personal residence, you have yourself a problem. You want to make sure that you move the scales towards the majority of your net worth in things like stocks or like rental properties or things like that.

You need to make sure you have your wealth in the correct assets to build wealth over time. Now you may be fighting back on this. I encourage you to run the numbers and do the math. I encourage you to do it. You're going to see real quick. If you do it the right way. That a house only appreciates about 2 to 3 percent per year when you factor in all the other costs that are associated with it.

And so you gotta make sure that you are running those numbers. Now, there are a bunch of other reasons to buy a house. This is things like stability. This is things like customization. This is things like community. You know, you wanna have your kids raised in a certain area. Absolutely amazing reasons to buy a house.

I've owned a house since I was 24. And so it is something that I definitely wanna do for other reasons that are not financial. And so I think most people just need to understand that portion of it. Now, for the most part, looks like you are really good with your finances. You're maxing out all of your stuff.

I mean, no, you understand that rant that I just had there most likely. And so this is something that is probably not new to you. And because of this, you know, run those total costs of ownership calculator, make sure the calculation makes sense first. And then when you're ready to buy a house and you're starting to save up for that down payment, this is fantastic that you actually are going through that process.

What I would do is. As long as you're hitting those retirement goals that I think reducing those 401k contributions can be a place that you take it. If there's somewhere else that you are spending money and you feel like, Hey, I don't really value this as much. You want to do a value comparison on this.

So say, for example, you look at your entire budget and you're spending 10 percent of your income on food and eating out and all that stuff combined together. You're spending 15 percent of your income on a vehicle or car payments. You know, those are some areas that you can look at and say to yourself, Hey.

Am I spending too much in this area? Do I actually value this or is there somewhere in my life or multiple places in my life that I want to reduce in order to be able to save for this down payment? Because what I would not recommend is going to the 401k first, just because you know the percentage there.

What I would do is look at the other areas of my life. Can I save a half percent here? Can I save 1 percent here? And over time, that's going to build up to maybe your 5 percent of your income. If you look across your budget. So at first I would look across my budget to see are there areas that I don't value.

Now, if your budget is optimized and you're valuing all the dollars that you spend, Hey, more power to you. Now it's time to look in other areas. And then looking at your Roth 401k is a place that you can definitely start specifically since you're maxing out that or other Roth account. And the HSA. And so the order I would think about this is one, am I hitting my retirement goals?

And did I run total cost of ownership? If so, fantastic. Two, are there other areas in my budget that I would like to reduce because I'm spending money on things that I do not currently value? That's number two. I would definitely consider that. And then number three, then you are going in the right direction because I go HSA Roth, and then you have the Roth 401k.

So they're really both Roths, but at the same time, you can reduce that Roth 401k contribution if you want to, and go ahead and make sure you increase those contributions towards your house payment. Now, when you do make this adjustment, I would automate this process. So I would take that 5%. Wherever you take it from, and I would automate that into a savings bucket somewhere.

So like, there's a bunch of places that do this. I ally does this. I know, uh, so far, I think does this. Uh, so there's a bunch of high yield savings accounts that you can put it in, but I would automate that boom right into that high yield savings account every single month. So you don't have to think about it ever again.

You just make the slight adjustment and then you. Automated over so then all of a sudden you're free to do whatever else you want. You don't have to think about this 5 percent every single month. So that's exactly how I would think about that is going in that order. And then if you have no other discretionary spending that you want to reduce, then you can start reducing that Roth 401k, but grab that total cost of ownership calculator.

If you guys have not anybody else listening out there. Has not tried and tested that out. Make sure you run the numbers on that. That is one of my favorite tools that we have here. Uh, and it's really going to help you make decisions based on housing. And a lot of people have really, really loved that tool.

Question number two. Hey, Andrew, I have a question for you. How can I find out if I have a 401k from a previous employer? I left the company in 2018, and I don't know offhand who it was with or if I had one. The issue is, they merged and I lost all of the HR contact info. So I'm lost as to where to look.

Google was not much help, and I tried Beagle, but they didn't want to pay for it if they didn't have to. Thanks in advance. So wonderful question. This is something I think a lot of people struggle with. We've gotten this question actually a few times in the past. And so I think this is going to be really helpful for folks to understand the process of how to look for this.

Number one is if you can, I know some of this you may have already done, but this is kind of for other folks as well. If you can try to check old paperwork or emails. To see if you could find any indication of where this thing was. Cause this is tough. You really definitely want to make sure that you can find one if you have it.

Uh, and so what I would do is kind of look at old pay stubs. Maybe you can look at some old emails, go way back in your Gmail history or Yahoo or whatever you use, or old tax documents from that employer and see if you can find that, uh, in the company's 401k provider may be listed in these documents. If you have an old employee handbook that they emailed you, something of that nature will have that information in there.

Or you can also look to see if you could find deductions labeled for retirement contributions. That's also maybe something that you could look for. Number two is if they'd merged with another company, I would contact the new merge company. Since the company merged, the new entity is most likely going to have at least some of the former employees for one K accounts.

And so you can try contact. You know, new companies, HR and benefits department and ask if they have this information or legacy 401k plans is also the other thing that you can ask for. Uh, hopefully they have those on file. They should. Uh, but if they don't, then we can go to the next step, which you can do something like checking the national registry.

So the National Registry of Unclaimed Retirement Benefits is a free tool that you can use that helps you search for unclaimed retirement funds. Uh, you just need to put in your social security number to check if those 401k accounts have anything under your name. So, um, the website for this is unclaimedretirementbenefits.

com. And so that's the place that you can go to try to find some of your retirement benefits out there. That is another tool because so many people struggle with this. They actually created this website for people to be able to find this. Uh, If those three don't show anything, if you really want to work hard on this and try to make sure you can find it, what you can do is also contact popular 401k providers.

So you can, you know, put in some calls to providers like Fidelity, Vanguard, principle, all of the 401k providers that a lot of people deal with. Merrill Lynch is another one. And so get a list of those together. You can contact them. They can tell you within, you know, five, seven minutes, if they have an account with your information in, um, Um, you just give them some of your information.

They probably put you over to the right department and you could probably contact a bunch of these. You can even use chat bots if you wanted to, to have the conversations with these folks, and maybe they'll give you the phone number, but I would be chatting with each of these all at the same time, that way you don't have to waste all your time on individual phone calls, but it's worth the time.

If it's thousands of dollars that you have in that 401k, then it's worth the time to be searching this down. And then the other thing I would do, number five is I would review your tax documents. Go back to all your tax documents from those days and look at your old tax returns, specifically form 1040 or form 1099 R.

And those might indicate any 401k distributions or rollovers from that job. So you got to make sure that you were looking there too. And those are the five ways that I would look at this before paying somebody. And you can go through all five of those. Then if you really think you had one, then it's time to probably look at either paying someone or making a final decision on what you want to do.

But those are the five things that I would look at. I would go through that process and see if I could find it. Now the easiest and I think the fastest way is to contact that merge company because if they have that information on file, you'll be able to get that pretty quickly and they'll be the most likely to give you the full piece of information that you have.

They should have those files from the company that they purchased. I purchased companies before we get all the files and from all old employees and we have those available. And so that's something I think you definitely need to make sure. Uh, that you call their first to and then just continue to check all your old paperwork emails.

Do some searches, uh, in your emails. You can even search the major brokerages in your emails and see if you can find anything from them and any emails or anything like that and see if those pop up. So I always save. I don't delete all my emails like a lot of times you can go search through your old emails and I find some All the time just by doing a search.

So go through that process. Let me know how it turns out. I really hope you can find this thing cause I know it can make a huge impact on people. Uh, and it's probably, if it's been invested for this whole timeframe, it might be a lot bigger than you think it is. So if you can find it and it has been invested, it's most likely a lot bigger than you think it is.

We've had some great. And so nothing is more fun and surprising than having a bunch of free money. And I'm talking thousands of dollars of free money, just because you let it ride. Fidelity did a study a long time ago, and I talk about this all the time and their best investors were folks that had passed away because they just let their accounts ride and let it grow over time.

And so I think that's the fun thing about if you can find this thing. That could be something that could be really fun that happens to you too. So, uh, keep you posted, let me know and let me know how much it's grown too. If you do find it, shoot me an email and let me know how much it's grown. All right.

The next question is I struggle with debt while also trying to build my savings and having enough leftover to invest. I have about five to 6, 000 in debt and I'm trying to figure out the best way to pay down the debt while I'm putting enough into other buckets. What do you suggest? I don't make a six figure salary, so I'm finding it hard to divide the money enough.

So this is something that I think a lot of people struggle with because we only have so much money coming in. And even the first question that we had on this episode, it was one where, you know, you only have so much money coming in. So you want to save for a down payment, or you only have so much money coming in and you want to make sure that you are reaching the financial goals that you are going for.

And in this scenario, people who have debt like this, even if it's, you know, five to 6, 000, you want to make sure you're allocating enough to Towards that to make real progress so that you're not going backwards. Now, first of all, I want you to know right now that if you are in debt, I know you can do this.

I know you can pay this debt off. This is something that, Hey, you realize you made a mistake. That's the first step. Now, what we're looking at is to make sure that we can build a plan so that we can get this paid off. And so I definitely know you can do this. It's going to be so powerful. Once you actually get this debt paid off and make this change.

So I'm so excited to even go through this process with you. Now, when we go through five to 6, 000 of debt, first, we want to evaluate which of this debt is high interest. If it's all high interest, let's say for example, all 6, 000 of this is credit card debt, which is pretty much always high interest debt.

Uh, then we want to make sure that we are really attacking this debt as fast as we possibly can. So here's your game plan. Okay. The first thing you're going to do. Is you're going to build up a one month emergency fund. Okay. One month of emergency fund is going to allow you to really aggressively start paying this down.

And so what I would do is at least get that emergency fund to one month of your monthly expenses. And so if this is going to take you a really, really, really long time, get that one month of emergency fund, at least reasonable enough. That if any big emergency were to happen, then you can pay it off. So let's say, for example, you live in California and your expenses, because you have kids in daycare and you have all these other things going on at the same time are 12, a month.

Well, if we are in that scenario and we only have so much money coming in, maybe we need to get a emergency fund saved up to 5, 000 and then we can start paying off that debt because we don't want to be waiting for like three years before we're paying off this debt. It's just going to grow over time.

But if you're in a scenario where you're living on, you know, three, 5, 000 a month, you need that one month emergency fund. It's really important to have that protection because what happens to most people is they say, for example, 1, 000 emergency fund, and then an emergency comes up and it puts them into more debt because they didn't have enough cash on hand.

And so I want you to have enough cash on hand and in order to do that, you need to have one month of expenses saved up in your emergency fund. So this is the one part of the 136 method. If you've never heard of our 136 method, we talk through how we can save this money up. Okay, so we have one month of living expenses in emergency fund.

Now we have this cushion available. Now we're going to focus on this high interest debt. We are going to attack this high interest debt with every extra dollar that we have. We want to start cutting back even on stuff so that we can attack this debt because this debt is robbing us of being able to build wealth.

And I want you to see this debt as the enemy. So I want you to go after this debt with every extra dollar you have. We're not going to have balance investing with this. We're not going to balance other things with this. Instead, we're going to be going and attacking this debt. This debt is going to be a huge deal for you to make sure you're getting after it.

So every extra dollar you can, if you can reduce some of your discretionary spending to pay off this five to 6, 000, do it. Cause if it's anything above a 6 percent interest rate, we want to get rid of it as fast as we possibly can. Next. So once you start to do that, once you get that debt paid off, luckily, you have 5 This is manageable.

This is something that I know you can do. And so once you have this 000 paid off, I want you to then go and start building up your three month emergency fund. And so when you start to build up towards three months, you're That's when you are starting to become very financially stable in terms of anything that could happen in life.

You'd be very well protected for most scenarios, but we really are building up to six months. Okay. So in the long run, we're building up to six months. Once you have that three month built up, then what you're doing is you're starting to invest. And so now we're starting to invest. And starting to build wealth over time.

And so now you can start restarting investing because you have that debt paid off. You have a three month emergency fund. Now we're investing towards our financial future. And we are doing it in a way that is really safe. It's going to allow you to create safety within your financial situation. So you never go back into debt again like that, especially consumer debt.

And so now you have this safety net that you're putting around yourself that allows you to build wealth long term. That's what we want. We are long term investors here. We are going to be building wealth long term. And so you have this safety net around you. Now you're starting to build wealth long term, and this is going to allow you over time to really see your money grow without any interruption whatsoever.

And so the goal with the six month emergency fund, as you start to invest, and then you're putting more hat, you know, you could put 50, 50 investing in emergency fund. You can go 75 investing in 25 emergency fund. I would not go majority emergency fund when you're going from three to six months, but your goal, your ultimate goal is to get.

Get the six months of your emergency fund. And then once you have that six months, you can decide if you want to continue building that emergency fund, or if you're okay at six months, you're fine staying at six months. And so that's exactly how it approached. This is attacking the debt in that step by step manner.

That's exactly how we teach it here. The one three, six method is a really core tenant of what we're teaching now, because it is so powerful in how you. You can build wealth and protect yourself at the same time. We want to be able to be financially protected. We want nothing to interrupt our wealth building.

Once we get this financial baseline set up, you may have to restart the one three, six method. When you have to use your emergency fund for a big expense, that's okay. That is completely okay. We have an entire episode talking about this and how you can restart your emergency fund. I don't think that's a big deal.

It's not a big deal whatsoever. You rebuild it over time. And then you're back to where you were. So that's really, really important, uh, to think through this process. And I'm so glad you sent to this question. Let me know when you pay off this debt. I want to celebrate with you, uh, as you go through this process and appreciate you sending in that question.

All right. Now the fourth part of this is we're going to talk about another data breach that happened. Uh, where 1 3rd of the U. S. Populations background info is now public, and I'm going to go into an article, um, that kind of talks through this. I'll link the article in the show notes below. But this is something again that these data breaches are getting more and more frequent, and it is starting to get really frustrating.

But this is why we talk about this so much is because your money is on the line here, and so we want to make sure that your finances are protected. And so we talk about this so to make sure that you're protected. So what happened was there was a massive data breach that exposed about 106 million Million records containing private information about U.

S. Citizens. Now the leak affects about one third of the U. S. Population, which is why this is a serious concern for a lot of folks listening, and it's something that we really need to think about data security as we go through this. So there's a company called M. C. Two data, which is a background check company that collects and analyzes personal information From public records.

They look at criminal history, employment details, family information, all that kind of stuff. And so this company is used by a bunch of different fortune 500 companies, but also by employers, landlords, and other entities that want to look at background checks for people. Like if you want to rent from someone, they'll do a background check, or if you want to work at a company, they'll do a background check.

And so they have so many people's information. And so there's been leaked data that include people's names, emails, home addresses. Phone numbers, dates of birth, employment history, and even partial payment information for some of this stuff. Now, the information that they have on why the leak happened, it sounds like it was a human error.

Meaning that somebody either was phished and they were given out the information, or they just messed up and sent the information to the wrong person. But, this is just another instance of this ongoing concern. Of our private information is out there, and it's really not even something that we can control and that we need to get our information removed as much as possible.

Why? So let's say, for example, someone got your information from this data breach. Okay? And let's say that they took your information and they got a couple of pieces. So they got your name, they got your home address, and maybe they got something else. Well, if they have that information, they can Google it.

Your name and your home address and see what comes up and find the rest of your personal information out there from other data brokers. Now, data brokers have your personal information online, and this is why we talk about delete me so much because delete me is a company that removes your personal information from these data brokers.

And so you can do this yourself. It would just take a really long time and you won't be able to keep up with it. So you have to have somebody who helps you in your corner on this. It's just it's honestly impossible to keep up with. And so delete me will go in there. They remove your personal information from these data brokers that buy, they sell, they trade your data.

That information will include a ton of stuff like your name, your address, your phone number, your work history, property values, and a whole lot more stuff. So they go to people like MC2 and say, hey, remove this information from the internet. And so if this data breach happened, your information would not be there if it was an online attack.

And so this is something I think most people need to understand is that any of this stuff can be removed if you have a company in your side removing your personal information. So you can prevent a lot of your personal information being in the hands of other people. So if you go to join, delete me. com slash PFP 20, we can get you 20 percent off of any delete me plans.

And they are a company that I just, I really back because I truly believe in what they're doing. They are removing information and they are protecting your finances from a lot of this stuff. So When it comes to this, make sure that you are continuing to protect yourself. We will continue to talk about data breaches on this podcast only because your finances are at risk.

And the last thing I want you to do is have to start all over with your wealth building journey because you had a data breach. It is something that is so important to us, uh, to make sure that you have some sort of financial protection plan in place for yourself, for your family and building generational wealth.

So it is something I think that. Really, really think through this process and put together a plan. We will have more episodes. We have episodes talking about how to put together a financial protection plan. If you want, we will put together a step by step course. If you want to just let me know, and we will help you guys in any way we possibly can on this stuff, because it is so incredibly important.

And I know some people just don't think about it and it's really, really important to think through this process. Cause it's only going to get worse, especially with AI attacks and everything else, it is only going to get worse over time. So we really got to put a plan together to make sure that. That we are protecting ourselves.

So listen, thank you guys so much for listening to this episode. I truly appreciate each and every single one of you and thank you for investing in yourself because it's exactly what you do when you listen to this podcast is you are investing in yourself. If you guys have any questions, again, join the master money newsletter by going to master money.

co slash newsletter. You could join the newsletter there. Make sure you. Follow us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, and YouTube. Uh, we are doing a lot of cool stuff on YouTube. We're on actually on YouTube. We are showing the outlines of our podcasts as well, where you can actually follow along, uh, as you're watching or listening to podcasts.

So if you ever listen to podcasts or watch them on YouTube, it's a great place to watch the show. Um, and it is a great spot for you to be able to get a ton of value as well, because you can follow along with the outlines if you are a visual learner. So again, thank you so much for listening. I hope you have a wonderful week this week and we will see you on the next episode.