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!