I had this brainstorm, which I am going to implement for myself and wanted to suggest this to others as well: If you are not already maxing out your pre-tax retirement contributions, ask your HR/employer to increase your 401k/403b contribution by an additional percentage point when they change over to the new withholding tables, which should be sometime in February. Without taking any action, the change in withholding should make your take-home pay go up by a bit--a small amount, maybe easing the pressure a tiny bit if you are living paycheck to paycheck, but not enough overall to really make you feel wealthier. If you are not living paycheck to paycheck and you have gotten used to living on your current take-home pay, take advantage of the change in withholding tables to divert that extra amount into long-term savings rather than spending it on extra consumables. Your take-home pay should remain similar to what it was and your savings will increase. You could wait until after the change takes place and compare your January and February paystubs, or you could try to figure out the change from IRS Notice 1036 with the new withholding tables vs Pub 15 2017 if you are an accounting geek, or if you have a bit of wiggle room in your budget you could just take it on faith that one change will offset the other by an amount that you won't really notice. I'm not a master of payroll but I did calculate for myself that the decreased withholding will be about 1% of my takehome pay and thus a good opportunity to increase my 401k contribution from 11% to 12% (I also have a set dollar amount taken each pay and put into my HSA account, some of which I spend during the year and some of which ideally gets saved; between the two set-asides I will be putting away over 16%, although last year I did end up spending about 2/3s of what I put into the HSA for out of pocket medical expenses. In a healthier year I'd be able to save more of that, and at least the healthcare expenses were paid for with pre-tax dollars.)
Painless Savings Idea to Share
January 20th, 2018 at 11:15 pm
January 21st, 2018 at 12:27 am 1516494432
January 21st, 2018 at 02:23 am 1516501399
https://www.paycheckcity.com/calculator/salary/
It's been updated for the new tax tables.
January 21st, 2018 at 04:47 pm 1516553234
January 21st, 2018 at 05:00 pm 1516554041
January 21st, 2018 at 11:08 pm 1516576125
January 22nd, 2018 at 02:12 am 1516587148