So in this series I’ve been reflecting back on Mel’s Money Manifesto that I wrote back in 2013 and then… largely forgot about it. So I’ve been curious to see how I actually did over the last nine years and how many of these goals actually still matter to me.

If you’ve been following along, the last point (#6) was to learn how the stock market works and you can read a lot about not only how I learned what I do know but also how I pick the stocks I’ve picked over the years in the previous post.

In an attempt to not just repeat everything from the last post about stocks, I thought I’d talk a little about where I invest.

My first investment account was actually with E*Trade and I used a $25 gift card from my aunt to buy a few shares of phone company – I can’t even remember the name of it now – and it tanked. This was when I was in college.

This kind of scared me away from investing for a good, long time and the next investment account I opened was a Roth IRA with Fidelity when the boy I was dating at the time peer pressured me into opening one.

Best possible peer pressure situation.

For a few years, this was the only investment account I was concerned with. The goal was to try to max out my Roth IRA and I didn’t make if the first few years. I invested in a target date account because it was all just very confusing.

The one thing to remember about an account like an IRA is that once you transfer money into the account, you still have to invest it. Make sure you go into the account and move the money from the cash fund it sits in when you transfer money in from your bank into whatever your investments are.

After a few years, I remembered the long abandoned E*Trade account and invested in a stock called Hillenbrand because the only thing I felt confident investing in was death.

Over the next few years, after I would max out my IRA, if I had some cash leftover, it would go into my E*Trade brokerage account. I invested in a few other stocks I trusted and then I learned more about index funds and started focusing on two stocks in particular ITOT and DIA, which are collections of stocks.

On occasion over the years, I worked for larger companies that offered 401ks or 403bs. If there was a match, I prioritized contributing up to the match there and usually just picked the broadest index funds I could find among the offers for those accounts. To be honest, an ex-boyfriend actually picked my different investments for my first 401k, which has continued to performer pretty well for years longer than that relationship lasted.

A few years ago, I learned about Health Savings Accounts and how they can double to cover medical expenses in the immediate or let the savings grow with sort of a double tax bonus in that you can take a tax deduction for contributions in the year you make them and all withdrawals along the way – investment growth included – is tax free when used to acceptable medical expenses.

These days the investing plan is Any Employer Account with a Match -> Roth IRA -> HSA -> Brokerage Account Goals -> SEP 401k

And what’s that last one? That’s my final investment account, a SEP 401k, which is a self-employed plan. They are a bit of a hassle to setup and maintain but they do have some great tax benefits and allow self-employed folks to stash more away for retirement. Mine is also at Fidelity and so far, so good.

If you’re interested in seeing how the other goals on my Money Manifesto are going, you can read those posts here:

1. ) I will pay off all my debt. 
2. ) I will tithe 10%
3. ) I will save at least 15%
4. ) I will build up a $10,000 emergency fund.
5. ) I will max out my IRA every year.
6. ) I will put effort into learning how the stock market works better.

How do you order your investment goals each year?