2024 Contribution Limits, Track Your Finances with Empower, Munger Video, AI Courses

2024 Updated IRS Retirement Contribution Limits

Free Tool to Track Your Finances

The Path to FI is all about action, and the very first action I recommend is: Write down all your assets and liabilities to get your net worth and all your income and expenses to get an idea of your savings rate.

I’m old-fashioned, so I still use Excel, but for years on the podcast, we talked about Personal Capital as a top-tier free tool to track your net worth and finances.Jonathan loves Personal Capital (now actually called Empower) and so many people in our community use it and get a ton of value out of it.  If you’re looking for a step up from my spreadsheet option, I definitely recommend using this free tool from Empower to track your finances.

Charlie Munger: Psychology of Human Misjudgment

I recently highlighted a post with 28 essential pieces of wisdom from Charlie Munger, and to follow that up I just found a 14-minute video that does a better job of summarizing Munger’s speech on the psychology of human misjudgment than anything I’ve seen:

Charlie Munger: The Psychology of Human Misjudgment

Free Courses on Artificial Intelligence

For anyone looking to learn more about Artificial Intelligence, this helpful Twitter post from Roni Rahman links to five free AI courses that Microsoft just released on LinkedIn with OpenAI.

ChooseFI Community Taking Action This Week

• Jordon said, “My 1% better is reading your newsletter and clicking the link for the unclaimed property. It took 1 minute to submit a claim for a property listed as "over 100 dollars", and that turned into a check being mailed to us for $3,788!! I was shocked and excited because we have a baby due in a month and can definitely use all the extra cash at the moment. Thanks for letting us know about that!

• Paul & Jane said, “I recently saw a news article reporting on how federal funding for school lunch was ending. It reported that schools in Utah are still allowing kids to have school lunch even though they don't have the money to pay for it. I believe early childhood education is critical in a child's development and I am grateful to the schools providing school lunch for all students. The schools, however, are keeping a tab and expect payment before students graduate from high school. As you can imagine that tab could grow significantly by that time and could become a heavy burden for students and their families. I contacted our local school district in August and asked about the school lunch debt for the Elementary School in our neighborhood. It was just under $6,000 so we paid it off, which eliminated the school lunch debt for 120 students in our neighborhood. We don't know which students had school lunch debt, but it gave us lot of joy to help out.

• Kyra said, “My 1% better this week is sitting down with my husband for the first time in 8 years to look over our budget and finances. It's always been something I enjoyed staying on top of so he never felt the need to know. After finding the ChooseFI podcast a year ago I started using Mint to track our expenses and found that we were spending more than we were making half the time. After we sat down together this week my husband asked that we continue to sit down each month moving forward and he asked for a raise (first in three years) yesterday. I've cut down expenses as much as I could in the last year, but now feel like I don't have to do this alone. Our FI date doesn't feel close at all, but I'm glad we're now pointed in the right direction.

• Elizabeth said, “Just wanted to share a win! My daughter just received her first college acceptance letter with an annual $23,000 merit scholarship! Without your previous episodes of college hacks and tips, that may never have been something we had thought about. We've been blessed with taking advantage of an associates degree during high school at no cost to her and with some military benefits she has from a parent, her pre med undergraduate degree will leave her with no debt.

• Jessica said, “I finally have a 1% improvement to share, and I'm so excited! My husband and I are completely revamping our energy system. We're getting a new roof, solar panels, solar batteries, a mini-split heat pump, and two water heater heat pumps. (One for our house and one for the second house on our property that we rent.) While the solar panels and batteries offer a 30% federal tax credit, I discovered that the government also offers a 30% tax credit on certain heat pump purchases...but only up to $2,000 annually. We're going to hit the $2,000 limit with our two water heater heat pumps. Since we're so close to the end of the year, I asked our contractor if we could purchase the mini-split heat pump in January. He agreed. I checked with my accountant and this will allow us to get the full 30% tax credit on the heat pump. That's a $1,650 tax credit just for moving the payment and installation of the mini-split heat pump from November to January. Whoo-hoo!

• Marnie said, “My 1% better this week was figuring out I could turn off the red notification bubbles over videos and marketplace in the Facebook app. I keep my Facebook primarily because I really enjoy the personal finance groups I'm a part of, and while I don't let social media apps send me push notifications outside of the apps, while I was in there I would often see those red notification bubbles and I just had to clear them. Once in, I would end up wasting hours looking at what marketers wanted to show me. I want to go seek things I need to buy, not have those things constantly seeking me creating longings for items I would have never even thought of before seeing them. I'm so glad I found a solution today, and I already feel freer.

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