The War Is On

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Along with the usual holiday festivities, in my household December is a month for financial move-making. The tradition entails things like cashing out savings bonds that have been sitting in a safe deposit box since the ’80s, depositing all or a portion of the annually permitted $6,000 into a Roth IRA, and a lot of procrastinating and second-guessing around these things, because thinking about money can be scary, stressful and exhausting.

For my December 2022 financial move, I took a significant chunk of change out of my credit union money market account that was paying me a 0.05% dividend rate and put it into a Vanguard Federal Money Market Fund with a 7-day SEC yield of 4.32% after being alerted to the opportunity by my Dad. I made the decision based on the fact that I had an existing relationship with Vanguard, could withdraw money out of the fund at any time, and would earn enough interest by the end of 2023 to cover the majority of the cost of a trip to Europe I have planned this spring. And, at the time, my credit union had no high-yield savings offers available (to be fair, the credit union is now offering a 15-month CD at 5.00% APY).