Oh whew. Yes at 23 you can safely start now. You don’t have plenty of time. The younger you start the less you have to put in per month due to compounding interest on retirement. So if you can start now, you won’t be playing catch up when your kids are in highschool and ready to go off to college. You can start lower. 10-15% in your 20’s.

Do either of your employers offer a 401k

If they don’t you can open an IRA with vanguard or fidelity pretty easily.

Play with some retirement calculators and see what the difference will be if you wait.

Well it’s not sustainable if they also don’t have a plan for retirement. Current lifestyle costs for everyone need to include the retirement plan. If the debt is for everyday expenses they are already above their means. If they can’t pay off $10k in debt when they have less expenses, how would they pay for any home maintenance or emergencies once their bills rise?

You have gross income listed, but I don’t see a line item for retirement. What are you putting away for retirement? If that is gross, what is it after tax?

You have $10k in debt. What was that from? You should clear that debt before buying a house. If you can’t clear the debt, you can’t afford a house.

This is what happened to me, my math and science courses needed to be within 7 years. It did not matter that I’d received a degree. I wasn’t going for a master though, just a different bachelors and an additional professional certification.

For the Anesthesiologist Assistant Masters, do you have the right pre-requisites from your Bachelors? Are you going to take the MCAT? Or GRE?

This is a career path I talk to my kids about. It does seem to be a very good path to a good income.

Ask for a promotion to that last persons position, if the won’t promote you (title as well) leave. If they do promote you, but don’t offer a raise that is inline with market rate for that position, polish the resume with the new title and start looking.

That 401k benefit is amazing. It’s part of the compensation package and you should be adding that monetary number when doing calculations.

5% match doubles - $11,000

Okay math is hard for me this morning, so this part might be wrong

Match on 12% minus first 5% - 7,700

So $18,800 added to your compensation?

I thought maybe with that income they were planning on living in the RVz

It seems it would be much cheaper to just fix the issue and keep driving the same car and saving.

We just did a $2k fix on our 20 year old 240k miles truck because it’s a lot cheaper to just keep our truck trucking than to buy a new truck. We did ask our mechanic if he felt we had anything else that needed to be done soon and he said no. If it’s just the one fix, just fix it.

If your fix is $500, then after 2 months back on the road you’d have already spent less than 2 months of car payments and insurance on a $30k car.