If you don't plan what to do with your money, it will disappear via lifestyle inflation. Anytime you get a pay increase, decide how much will go to discretionary items and how much to save and invest. Make sure your are contributing enough to your retirement savings, save more on the side and so on. For your discretionary spending, budget accordingly, and beware of common lifestyle creep areas (cars, clothing, food, housing).

As for the "acts of kindness", it's a good thing to remain charitable, but do it wisely, and consider the impact. If you go and help in your local food bank you could be helping people who are really struggling to get by, whereas if you go to a bar and buy a round of drinks for everyone there, you may be popular for that evening, but you are not really helping anyone in the long run. When you do acts of kindness, ask yourself if it's for your ego, or for the other person's benefit. You could even consider doing it anonymously.

Gotcha, so mostly large cap growth. You might consider adding some small cap or small cap value, but honestly you'll probably be fine.

Ah yeah, I missed the last where it was ACH. Disregard.

VTI has an expense ratio of 3 bps, while VTSAX has an expense ratio of 4 bps. So you would be paying slightly more for the exact same fund. But the different is negligible, so the bigger question is whether you would prefer to invest in an ETF or a mutual fund.

It really depends. If it's a condo or townhouse with shared walls and roof then that's about average.

Yep, this is what I did when renting a place that charged a fee for ACH.

Mostly just marketing tools. They matter if you are trying to get to a perfect score, but any score above 760 is already considered perfect by pretty much any lender, so it really doesn't matter.

Yes

Out of sight, out of mind is a powerful force :)

And just one word of warning: that cap also effectively applies when you go to take social security as well. So instead of the replacement rate being based off your actual income, it will be based off of the capped income. This means that to maintain a similar lifestyle in retirement you may need to increase your retirement contributions.

Interesting. I'm actually up slightly YoY. What is your asset allocation?

You can't max out both traditional and roth 401k anyway - the limit applies to any combination of both. Since you are already maxing out both, changing to contributing to Roth 401k would let you effectively contribute more (if you want to) because you are contributing with after-tax money.

Not going to lie, on first read I thought they were snacking on bones.

The number one thing you need to do is to create a proper budget and stick to it. You shouldn't just be spending money in the account down to 0 each month. Leave a buffer in the account that you treat as $0. For example, when the account balance is $100 that's it.

After you get some margin, you can work on breaking the paycheck to paycheck cycle, building an emergency fund, and so on. But first you need to start properly budgeting and only spending based on the budget to break the overdraft cycle.