Net worth is now around $989,400--so I'm expecting to hit a million this year at last.

With the company acquisition, we have all new benefit plans--same benefits essentially but different custodians.

I spent a couple of hours setting up my new 401k.  It's annoying that my old company managed the details of the allocation for me--all I needed to do was to pick a target risk allocation and they'd do the specifics, while I need to manage the allocation for the new plan.

I used my old plan allocations as a rough guide to set up the new ones, but there are some categories of investments--TIPs, dividend appreciation funds, and foreign bonds--that are not available in the plan options for the new 401k.  That is especially annoying about the dividend appreciation category, as I like to split the US equity allocation largely between index funds and dividend-oriented funds.  It took me a couple of hours of digging into the new plans options to figure out an allocation.

One good thing was that the new plan site has a calculator that allows you to figure the effect on your take-home income and taxes of varying allocations to the traditional 401k vs the Roth 401k option.  For the past couple of years, I've been contributing 10% pre-tax and 10% Roth.  The calculator allowed me to figure that contributing 18% to the Roth (and none to the pre-tax) should yield the same take-home pay.  So that's what I set the new allocation to, with a goal of increasing the allocation back to 20% (all Roth) in January.

Debt is on track to be down to 50k or lower by the end of the year, which makes me happy since it has been mostly between 75k and 90k for the past few years.  I have no idea if we'll get any bonus in January, which is when the new company issues bonuses--that bonus I got upon the close of the deal might be my only bonus until January 2026.  In any case, I have some inherited IRA accounts which have RMDs, and I have been using my RMDs to pay down debt, so by sometime in January, I expect to get debt down to 45k or so.  I am expecting an expensive home project next year, so I'll have to set aside some money in January for that.

Financial independence isn't yet here but it is definitely beginning to come into view!

So last Saturday was my birthday.  It was lovely to have it fall on a Saturday so that I had the day off!  Too many times in recent years the company president schedules a trip to PA during the week, which makes it extra busy.  He *was* up the week before, but all the extra busy-ness was over by the time my birthday arrived.

I took last Friday off (as I have been doing for much of the summer) and went to an AirBnB within about an hour's drive--just far enough to really feel "away" but not so far that the drive was stressful.  (I pretty much stopped driving distances during the pandemic.  Since I work a mile from where I live, most of my driving is within a 3-mile radius of home, and maybe once a month, I'll drive to a nearby town and go about 10 miles away.  Driving 50 miles or more has thus become a stressor that I tackle about once a year.)

Where I stayed was on a historic Amish homestead, the Nicholas Stoltzfus family home.  It turns out that everyone in the US with the last name of Stoltzfus is descended from the former owner of this property.

The original homestead is still there and I was given a private tour by the caretaker.  (The property is owned by a non-profit group, and a couple with the last name of Stoltzfus are the current caretakers.  The AIrBnB fees are used to support the upkeep of the property.)  Where you stay is in the reconstructed barn.  The caretakers live on the first floor of the barn, and the unit they rent is about 1/3 of the second floor of the barn.  The other 2/3s of the second floor is rented out for meeting space.  The property is built on a hill, so even though it's on the second floor, there are no stairs to climb.

Where the property is located is actually very close to the highway, but you have to drive down a long roadway, past a local Penn State campus and the campus of a retirement home, before you get to the property.  Then the deadend of the road due to the highway (built about 30 years ago) is just past the end of the property.  The caretaker showed me a map--when they were building the highway, there were eight different alternate routes they considered using, several of which would have gone right through the property--that's when and why the nonprofit was formed.  And the owner of the retirement community next door (the son of a former state governor) was helpful with the funding needed to save the property from being destroyed.  The current caretakers will be pursuing getting the property put on the national historic register soon--it's not there yet.

Right across the road is a creek, and a four-mile long towpath that runs along it.  There's a Park Ranger house a quarter-mile away, so the towpath feels very safe.  (That's especially nice because, since the pandemic, my current city has allowed a homeless encampment to occupy a large space alongside the towpath near my house, so I no longer feel safe running and walking there by myself, something I have done for nearly 30 years.)

Since check-in was at 3 on Friday, I got there shortly after and, after checking in, went to the nearby Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers Market to pick up dinner. We have a Farmer's Market locally that is similar (and similar to Reading Terminal Market, if you have visited that in Philly).  This Farmer's Market was smaller and exclusively run by Amish and Mennonite stallholders, unlike the larger Farmer's Markets.  I picked up a pint of chicken salad, two pre-made vegetable salads, a gluten-free peach pie and Whoopie pie, and a few peaches for my stay.

The drive had fatigued me (the stress of driving), so I went to bed early.  On my birthday itself, I had my tour of the historic home and then visited the Ephrata Cloister in the afternoon.  I had heard of the Ephrata Cloister previously but had not visited.  This is the remnants (about 10%) of the original community from the 1700s which was started by Conrad Beissel, an Anabaptist minister who founded his own sect, distinct from the other Anabaptist groups by virtue of two beliefs:  1.  The Sabbath should be celebrated on Saturday; and 2. The return of Christ was imminent, so that believers should shun wordly marriage and dedicate themselves soley to Christ--in other words, be celebate.  Not a recipe for a long-standing religion!  In actual fact, the community consisted of Brothers, Sisters, and Householders.  The Brothers and Sisters adhered to all the beliefs, while the Householders were married couples who believed in some but not all of the beliefs of the community and helped with economic support.  The Brothers and Sisters slept for only 6 hours a night--from 9 to midnight, and then from 2 am to 5 am.  From midnight to 2 am, they had a night watch service, since it was Beisel's belief that Christ would return during that time.

The community was also unique in fostering several women composers.  The Ephrata Chorus still continues today.  They also produced a unique style of calligraphy called fraktur used for making posters of religious phrases or important personal papers.

I did go out to dinner for my birthday, finding a Japanese restaurant nearby and treating myself to a rice bowl.

On Sunday, I went for a 3.6 mile walk/jog along the towpath, and stayed on the property until 1 pm (an extra two hours allowed me by the caretakers) before driving home.

Staying here was about $75 cheaper for a two-night stay than the Bed and Breakfast in the Poconos where I usually stay (although, unlike the B&B, there was no breakfast included).  While I had to provide my own food, the fact that the property was only about a mile from the Farmers Market pretty much compensated for that.  The area is busier and noisier than the Poconos since it is in the middle of a city, but, while I won't give up on my other B&B (which sits right along the Delaware River), I'll also add this place into my regular rotation of spots to visit for a weekend get-away.

Well, the company I work for was acquired yesterday.  Our name and the website change on Monday.  We'll be getting new computers too--instead of a regular PC with the ability to log into a virtual desktop from a device at home, I'll get a laptop and will need to lug it home or elsewhere if I want to work other than onsite.

The new company has different health insurance and different 401(k) plans, so there will be a lot of administratrivia and paperwork changing those.  I can roll the current 401(k) over to the new one or roll it to an IRA.  They're also closing our cash balance pension plan and issuing us a check for our accrued balance--I have the same options for that as well.

The new company has all employees paying a share for their health insurance and their vision and dental benefits cost a bit more.  They're adjusting my pay to make me whole on that.  

The company I've been working for is a smallish (22 employees) family-owned company.  The new company is actually an entity formed by a private equity group that has been on a campaign buying up independent RIAs (Registered Investment Advisors)--I believe we are the 7th acquisition since 2020.  Whereas I know, to at least some extent, all of the other employees at my current firm, I doubt I'll ever know all the other employees with the new firm.

Since the old company was small, our COO was in essence our HR department and we had an employee, not a lawyer, who handled SEC compliance.  The new department has an official HR department and a team of lawyers to handle compliance issues.  The merger gives us a better answer when clients or prospects ask about the firm president's succession plan (not that he is planning on retiring anytime soon).  We'll also get better service from the asset custodians, since advisors are assigned a level of service that is based on AUM (assets under management).

The new firm is headquartered in Boston, so we will all be taking a trip there in a month.  Boston is one of my favorite cities so it will be nice to see it again (for however much time we have to see things during a 3-day work retreat).

To start, there are supposed to be fairly few changes in our day-to-day experience since the main goal is to keep servicing our current clients in the way they have been accustomed to.  But we'll see what happens over time.  I can't deny that the change makes me nervous.  It could be a good thing, but perhaps not.  And while I've definitely felt that I have had influence over certain things like the choice of tax-planning software with my current firm, I don't expect to have that kind of influence with the new firm (EXCEPT that the plan is to move the aquiring firm over to the tax planning software that we use).  But who knows if I'll have that kind of influence again?

One good thing is that the owners of the old company gave each of us employees a very nice bonus upon the close yesterday.  When I saw the net amount in my checking account this morning, I paid off my highest-interest debt in full and paid down some of the next highest debt.  Total debt (including mortgage is now down to about $53k--and before learning of the bonus, my year-end goal had been to get it to $60k).  That accounts for about half of the bonus, and the other half I will be putting into savings in my brokerage account to have more of a buffer for future expenses.

In other news, yesterday the gas company moved my meter from indoors to outdoors.  They may have cracked my foundation in doing so.  I wouldn't have noticed, but I recently became Facebook friends wiht the former owner, who asked me about the crack when I posted a picture online yesterday.  I have no idea whether that was there before or not. So there will be that to deal with.

I couldn't help myself.  I did something I know is irrational.

When checking my mortgage balance this morning, I saw that $43.24 remained to the next thousand-dollar incrediment.

I had over $13 in rewards on a credit card at the same bank, so I applied $13.24 to the mortgage and then paid an additional $30 from cash to get the mortgage balance to $27,000 once all the payments settle.

I also have $8,500 on a HELOC, so total housing related debt is $35,500.

The HELOC interest rate is more than twice the rate on the mortgage, so I should have applied the extra payments to the HELOC, but I couldn't help myself--round numbers have a definite allure.

It's how I've accelerated my mortgage payments ever since first taking it out in 2005.  I've ALWAYS rounded the balance down to the next hundred by paying extra towards principal--until interest rates skyrocketed, and then I rounded the mortgage payments down to the nearest $10 so I could apply more payments to my debts that have higher rates.

Current TOTAL debt is about $61,500 with about $14,300 (including that HELOC) at rates over 6%.

The higher interest debt will be refinanced in October at lower (not low, but lower) rates.  I'm assuming that the Fed will cut rates in September, which should lead to a bit of a drop in loan rates, and I have more "hard checks" on my credit score than I should due to some credit card fraud I experienced in February.  I caught the fraud right away and notified the agencies, but none of them have taken the false "hard checks" of my score.  I did have a "real" hard check from last October, which should roll off mid-month and improve my score a bit more.  If I had time and energy to deal with the credit card agencies, I would, but I don't.  It's just easier to wait and have a plan.

My goal at the beginning of the year for year-end debt was $60k.  I should actually get there either this month or next.

Then projected year-end debt is $55k as long as there are no more major repairs or appliance replacements.

Then January should lead to further decreases still due to a bonus, plus I apply my beneficiary Required Minimum Distribution from my inherited IRAs to debt reduction at that time.

My total debt (which maxed out at $108k in 2011, the year my mother died and I was both employed only part-time AND flying out frequently from PA to CA) hovered at around $90k for several years, and only recently started decreasing significantly once my salary increased to a certain level.  Debt reduction improved more (unfortunately) with the lack of pet expenses since last May.  There WILL be cats again, but in the interim, it is helpful to see my total debts going down, and especially down to a small fraction of my assets.