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Charles is in Topeka, Kansas.

Hey, Charles, what's up?

Hey, I just got a question.

So I recently purchased my second home and I I was able to buy in cash, and we paid off all our other debts this year. Doesn't that feel great? It does. I'm sleeping good. I'll tell you that. Coffee takes good every morning. I bet you are. I'm proud of you, man. Way to go. What's your net worth oh probably around you know six or seven

hundred thousand good for you way to go out and all the cars good for you but yeah so

after child care all my bills groceries that kind of stuff I have about 2,000

left over and I want to know how much monthly I should throw

into, like, retirement or, you know, custodial accounts for the kids because I, you know,

kind of want to do some dumb stuff and go on vacations and do things like that. Oh, that's not dumb.

You've earned it. You should go do those things. Yeah. So you've just got to lay it out and parse it out and go, okay, there's three things I can do with money at Baby Step 7. I can have fun with it and I should. I can be generous with it and I should. And I can invest it and I should. As far as kids custodian accounts, how old are the kiddos? six months and two and a half. Okay. Yeah, I mean, you can put some in there.

I wouldn't overload it too much.

If you want to put some in a 529 instead and be thinking about college, that's fine,

or education of some kind.

Trade schools also qualifies for 529s.

So whatever they're going to do, they're going to need some training post high school.

And, yeah, I'll be preparing for that, but you don't have to go hog wild on that. And you should

be putting at least 15 percent. You should have been before you paid off the house, 15 percent

of your household income going into retirement accounts. But at this stage, you ought to be doing more

than that. We were trying, but we were in a house that we probably shouldn't have been, but I bought a fixer-upper, and it's all worked out in the end. Okay, so you got that behind you, so now you can put at least that away, but you ought to be putting at a minimum of 15, but at Baby Step 7, I'd like to say you'd be doing more than 15% of your income into retirement and be doing something towards the kids' college and something towards fun.

And there ought to be room in this budget to do all that.

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