Hey, all -
So, a bit of a long one (and perhaps a bit dry), but Nina and I got a call from our accountant on Friday to say that if we were able to put $46,000 into a retirement account by the 15th we'd be eligible for about a $20,000 or so refund on our taxes from last year. Which was exciting and frustrating as we didn't happen to have $46,000 lying around!
Pre-possibility game I would have either grumbled or borrowed, but we wanted to try something different so we asked ourselves the questions and realized that while "we could never do that", we did have the money in our kids college funds.
A few more questions later we got to the point of recognizing that if we knew we could replenish the funds AND the penalties for early withdrawals didn't offset the tax savings, we would do it. So we figured out how to do that and because the funds had actually been losing money, there was no penalty for early withdrawal. (thanks, economy!
)
Next challenge - there was no time to guarantee the money would get from their college funds to our checking account in time. So we asked the possibility questions of the woman from the investment company and she figured it out for us!
Final challenge - on the day, $5000 of the funds hadn't cleared. A few more questions, a few more answers, and we now have an extra $46K in retirement funds and an extra $20K or so to add to the kids college funds.
We've decided that we like this game very much...
