it’s the end of the year again and i am checking out the financials of my 401k. i probably don’t pay enough attention to its performance as i should, but it seems that i did reasonably well for the funds that i elected to invest in. i think the [url=http://old.journal.ocliw.com/2003/0530.php]last time i checked[/url] on my 401k, it was back in may! damn! well, it turns out that since the may check-in, things have been doing better, and i’m getting about a 10% return on investment. better than money in the bank, i guess.
i’m kind of upset because i went through great pains when i first set up the 401k stuff so that i’d contribute a very specific amount and it turns out that the math i did was wrong. i even had someone double check the math for me, but still…no dice. so i’m actually contributing more than i wanted to into the 401k this year. bummer. that could have been money that i could have played with…now locked away forever. grrrrr.
no, the overcontributed money doesn’t just vanish, but it is not tax-exempt so the fed gets its cut of the money and whatever is left over is put into the 401k. much like if i were to put money from the bank into it. kind of defeats the purpose of things.
so the money you overcontributed just vanished? *horror*
i wanted to max out my 401k, but the 401k plan didn’t start until april of this year. (don’t even get me started about the company not offering 401k before that…) so i wanted to max out my 401k but i had to do the math to figure out what i had to withhold every paycheck to make sure that i withhold the max.
i think what happened was that i must have miscounted the number of paychecks i had remaining this year. as a result, i over-contributed (and, therefore, WASTED) that excess amount. grrr.
eh? you *don’t* max out your 401(k)?