J.C.’s Money Blog

I determined that I can likely make significantly more money working on websites than I can with my corporate job. One major point of concern for me which has prevented me from getting started right away is my unvested 401k match.

Next year in September, my retirement account through work completely vests. Right now my unvested balance is about $9,000. I will directly be giving up $9,000 by quitting. Ok, if I wanted the money now, I would have to pay a 10% penalty, so I am left with only about $8,000. (Yes, I would also have to pay income tax, but I have to do that with any money I “earn”, so I’m ignoring the tax implication here.)

Asside from my unvested balance, I have been saving an average of $2,000 per month since I started my job. So the increase to my net worth if I keep my job will look like this:

Note: My savings as of yet are too small in comparison to take their potential invesment income into account.

My initial goal was to do what I call here “breaking even”, where my net worth would be the same whether I simply continued on at my job, or quit my job and worked on my websites full time.

But, in order to break even, I must save $26,000 by September!