I have to admit, I've gotten a bit sloppy on these finances. What I mean is I have 4 figures+ now earning no interest at all.
I am not an NFL quarterback, nor a rock star, but, believe it or not, for the first time in my life (2023), the money is coming in too fast. My net income is far more than my expenses.
What compounded this effect, is having no house payment, and effective 1/1/23, my wife picked up the health care. So that saved me about $850/mo.
My direct deposit goes into 4 accounts--none of these earn any interest, yet each one of them are approaching 5 figures. My excuse or justification is I'm simply too busy during the week to even login to move the money. I'm 2 places, either at my desk at work, or in my car driving to work. If I worked from home I'd be moving the money into my online money market which is at 4.4% and probably wandering around aimlessly at Costco shopping on co. time like everyone else I see there during the week.
My home loan was at 3.37%, and I paid it off in July regardless of the online money market being at 4.4%.
I think I mentioned I owned vmWare stock and now there is both Broadcom stock and a bunch of cash in my JPM online account. That cash is also doing nothing. It's 5 figures. It's a pretty fair assessment to say every $10k doing nothing is losing nearly $1.25/day--that isn't nothing to me, but again, I haven't got the time to do anything about it thanks to work. $1.25 is something, it's not nothing, because I pay $5/day for the bridge. I bring my lunch to work, I don't spend $14/day like the kids in the office.
I tell myself if I didn't have to work for a living, I'd have more time to keep up with this stuff. Yes, I'm stubborn, I remember what Jack Bogle said so I refuse to pay.
Three out of four money managers can't beat the market, so why pay them to try? My HS buddy is one of them, his fund was terrible, trailed the market for 30 years. But he has a 6 mil. home in Massachusetts. I'll try harder in 2024, maybe. What you gonna do.
A very small consolation is that I've contributed to the 401k at the IRS max for about 15 years, and that is 100% invested in the S&P. I get alerts that this is too aggressive for my age. So at least I am investing something towards the market regularly.