Hope I didnt scare you off. Its a lovely city but yeah I would expect it would be tight on 65k a year for two. If you rent a 1 bedroom then maybe talking more like $1600/mo. Food for two its probably possible to do on $500/mo. Gas is about $4.50 a gallon out here. I mean Im sure you can manage but yes it is expensive to live in Seattle and your lifestyle and comfort moving here from Texas would almost certainly take a hit.

Not by much I did say slightly above minimum wage. A couple grossing 62k (minimum wage) would pay 4.7k in FICA and 3.5k federal so they would take home about 54k a year. So youd be 20% above that which is what I meant when I said slightly above minimum wage standard of living assuming you wish to maintain your savings rate. Also as I said people do live in Seattle on that so it is possible it would just be tight.

I live in Seattle (like right on the city limit) in a house (so own not rent) with a family of four and we spend about $10k/mo here. We do mostly cooking for food and we spend about $1400/mo on food. Not claiming that is a minimum cost of living but i hang out on this subreddit and we are frugal people. Our takehome after savings (57k pretax) and taxes is 3x yours though.

The median household (gross) income in Seattle is $97k. The median rent for a 2 bedroom apartment in Seattle is $2756 (so 33k a year). Our house is old (like 1940s), 1600 square feet and not central to Seattle at all (at the edge) and its on Zillow at 835k. So you would be in the bottom half.

Seattle is probably in the top 5 highest COL cities in the nation.

I mean people making minimum wage live in Seattle so it is possible but the cost of living is very high.

Minimum wage here is $15/hr so 15 x 2080 = $31200 a year so two people making minimum wage living together would pull in $62,400.

So your income in Seattle would mean living slightly above minimum wage standard of living.

The neighborhoods around Seattle are not much cheaper and the ones to the east in many cases are more expensive.

Something you have to realize about longterm investing...

Today you buy $100k of a stock fund and you get 1000 shares worth $100. The next day the markey crashes and drops 80% of its value. How many shares do you own now? Well...still 1000, they are just $20 a share now. That only matters if you withdraw the money then. Almost certainly in 10 years those shares will be worth more than $100 a share...and you still have 1000 shares.

Number of shares matters. Value of shares only matters when you cash out. If you are longterm investing what the market is doing right now doesnt really matter.

i mean if one month of your expenses is truly only $1.6k then sure you can just put 6.5k into Roth from savings now.

This year the make is 6.5k not 6k just FYI. If you can max it now and still have savings for an emergency max it now. If that would eliminate all your savings then just add to it each month.

He got unlucky....or he never bothered with scheduled maintenance and tuning.

Check the actual fees, target date funds are managed and usually have higher fees than unmanaged index funds. Though in some cases the fees are still very low so it isnt a big deal.

You don't get penalized for high utilization...not really. As long as you aren't overspending on the card to the point you can't pay it off whenever you are absolutely fine. You could 90% utilize your card for years and then decide that next month you are going to get a car loan and so you pay your car off in full and your score will be just as high as had you kept your utilization low all that time. Negative impacts on credit score from utilization are ephemeral and go away as soon as you pay down the card...they don't last.

People freak out about utilization and it really does not matter. Honestly...don't worry about it at all.

..and why did you owe so much last year? Was your witholding incorrect? Did you earn more or less last year?

Those questions are relevant to figuring out why you owe so much this year. You should look at last years taxes and see what went wrong then.

Thanks for clarifying.

Did you file and pay taxes last year?

You cant really read a chart and get an accurate return for a target date fund...they change their assets regularly. If you try to look at the 30 year return for a 2030 fund it will be a smear of returns going from almost all stocks to a fair amount of bonds. That isnt really a good way to read relative performance.

Id just use the target date fund with the date being your estimated retirement date. So if you think you will retire in 2060 go with the 2060 fund. Unless the expense ratio for those funds are very high relative to the other funds on offer.

no it isnt. Would be half that.

There is no way you would owe 22k in taxes if 75k is the entirety of your income.

There is no way that medical bills and insurance payouts can cause you to owe taxes...I dont even know what you mean by that.

Do you have other sources of income? Did you have basically no taxes witheld for more than one year and just failed to file taxes last year? If you filed taxes last year how much did you owe then and what has changed if anything?

Also is it 22k or 25k, your title and post arent the same.

I mean if you are truly down and you are not exagerating (ie you have contributed more than you actually have left) then withdrawing won't be a taxable event and you can in fact claim any loss as a deduction on your taxes (up to $3k per year and it rolls over) then you could use that cash to put a payment on a house sure. But you would also be locking in your losses.

Depends how much you want to rush home ownership.

Well...i get what you mean but you dont actually get the yield until it pays out after 4 months.

You didnt pay 5k. How much did you actually pay. Also 4.35% is annualized. For a 4 month tbill you would have earnws 4.35%/3 or 1.45%. So...you likely paid about $4927 for your 5k tbill...check your bank.

Treasury bills. Currently at about 4.9% for a guarenteed return. Can do a ladder where you buy a tbill with part of your money then a month later buy another and another and by the time you use all your savings buying tbills the initial tbill cashes out so you constantly have them cycle back to cash.

Yeah...thats what bad years are for.

So i would have had to initiate the rollover and empty the traditional IRA account by 12/31/2022 and since I did not do that I am basically out of luck for a 2022 backdoor Roth.

Well, that sucks but not the end of the world...lesson learned.

Wait. So I also have money in a rollover tIRA that I was going to rollover into a 401k before doing a backdoor Roth to avoid pro-rata. I thought I has until April 2023 to do both steps. Was that wrong and I only have until 12/31/2022 to pull money out of the rollover IRA to avoid pro-rata if I do a backdoor Roth for 2022 say march of 2023? If so I guess Im not doing a backdoor Roth in 2022 then damn.

They are the exact same holdings, one is juat an ETF and the other is a mutual fund. So do you want an ETF or a mutual fund?

I mean in this case I think those numbers are meant as an upper bound not as a suggestion. IE you shouldn't spend more than 25% on a house, you shouldn't spend more than 8% on a car...not that you SHOULD spend that much. So it doesn't really make sense to expect to be comfortable if you are hitting what they are saying is the maximum for housing AND car.

Viewed that way my percentages of 14%, 2% and 40% all match up really...I don't spend more than 25% on housing, I don't spend more than 8% on a car. I do invest or save at least 25%. I don't think spending 8% on a car is meant to be a goal just meant to say if you are spending more than this you might want to reconsider. Again as a guideline.

As other posters have pointed out there are parts of this country where unless you are in the top 5% you are absolutely not spending only 25% of your income on housing. That just isn't a thing. Maybe Money Guys would suggest that means you are in an area that is overpriced for your income and you should try to move I don't know but I think they know that, they are just trying to give broadly applicable advice and not focus on the edge cases of very HCOL areas or very high or low incomes.