DH and I are going through FPU and we had decided that we are finally ready to take the step of stopping our retirement contributions temporarily so we can apply that money to the debt snowball. I had no problem stopping mine at work since I'm the one that does the payroll. DH went into his payroll department and was told that he can't stop his contributions until the beginning of the next quarter.

It's just very frustrating to finally have him on board and now we can't do this. It will really slow the debt snowball down. I guess I'm just anxious to get it done and get a fully-funded emergency fund.

I think I finally figured out DH's retirement website. What a pain that thing is! I see when I logged on that they are in the process of developing a new site. Thank goodness!!!

I have been wanting to reallocate his investments for ages, but each time I finally managed to log onto the site, I was so confused that I had no idea what to do. And I would get so frustrated that I'd just about be in tears, so I'd just give up. Today I finally took the time to sift through everything and saw the link I needed to do the changes.

He has had this plan since 1991 and the money seems to do absolutely nothing with the only allocations that were available to us until recently. Just this year they finally added some more options and I knew that I wanted to get his investments out of where they were and into a targeted fund account.

So now everything (I think) is in the targeted fund account. We'll see how that does. I sure hope it does better than what it has been doing all these years!

DH's 401k is finally offering some different investment options. He's been contributing the maximum that the company will match half on for at least 13 years now and it just hasn't seemed to grow much.

He brought home literature last week that introduces 3 new plans. As soon as I saw a targeted fund I told him that's what we wanted. My IRA is in a Vanguard targeted fund and I love it. His will be with American Funds.

I am anxious to see if it does better than what he has now has been doing.

My IRA is in a Vanguard targeted fund and I'm very happy with its performance. I hadn't been able to access my account online since I had to reformat my computer last month. I made a call, got my access back and was pleased to see that instead of the $5400 I thought I had, I now have over $6000.

I also took the opportunity of their offer to stop receiving paper statements and instead have electronic delivery of messages. Because of this they will waive their annual service fee.

I had to fill in at my hometown library today so while I was there I scouted out their books on personal finance, naturally. I spotted one, You and Your 401(k), by Julie Jason that looked interesting.

I've commented to my husband that we needed to look into his 401(k) and figure out why it doesn't seem to be gaining much ground. He's had it since the mid 90s and has been contributing up to what the company will match most of that time, but it just doesn't seem to be doing much. Neither of us know anything about how to pick what funds to invest in, so we just took a friend's advice years ago and really haven't done anything else to it.

On the other hand, I've only had my IRA for not even 2 years and it's already worth 1/4 of what his 401(k) is worth.

So I thought this book might be a big help to us so that we are more informed. I will report back in on what I've learned from it.

I would really like to fully fund my IRA this year, but it doesn't look like I'm going to be able to do it. I currently contribute $2500 a year to it. I figured out that if I were to have the full amount withheld I would be missing another $56 out of both paychecks each month. My budget just won't support that.

I'm hoping that when I get my raise next year I can put all of that in the IRA. I think if I just keep my paycheck the same I won't even miss that money.

I received a notice yesterday that my IRA has officially been transferred to Vanguard so I hopped on the Vanguard site and, sure enough, there is now money in my retirement account! Yeah! Now maybe I'll start making some money on it. The process took much longer than I ever dreamed it would, but it's now done.