Some financial planning

At the Red Cross today, giving blood, the apheresis tech asked me what I did, so I told her. "Financial planning, I could use some of that myself." So I spent the time she was draining blood from my arm talking about personal finance.

Turns out she puts $50 per pay period towards a vacation fund and $50 towards a Christmas present fund, so that come Xmas she's got about $1200 to spend. She is 51 and has three grown kids aged 25 to 31 and some number of grandkids. She tries to spend $100 on presents for each.

I think maybe she was the one who had checked me in the last time I was there, and I think they were getting paid $14 an hour, something like that, which would annualize out to something like $28k, but I think raises were afoot at the time. I encouraged her to put 10% if not 15% into her 401k and that sounded like a lot (though she was putting in excess of 10% a year towards shorter term goals. 

She and her husband paid $43k for an older house and are gradually fixing it up. She tries to buy a door a month, have put in cabinets and various stuff. She drives a Nissan (I said get a Toyota for her next car because they last longer).

I talked to her about how we had consciously given our kids somewhat smaller Xmas and birthday presents through the years so that the events would be less connected in their minds with windfalls. I didn't want to seem like a hard ass, but honestly it seems like she is putting too much $ into gifts and nobody had really turned her attention to the longer-term retirement picture.