Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about yet. I'm making this post so people can point out flaws in my reasoning, so I can learn from that.
Do you have health insurance? What do you pay for it?
I wouldn't recommend selling the 16K car for a 1.6K car, but I'm just a stubble kind of guy here, so take my advice as less than the other advices here. The reason I say no to that is because first, a $1600 car has a good chance of running like crap (or not at all) and needing tons of maintenance. Second, you're losing a lot of value on that trade. If your car is truly worth 16K, you're going to have a hard time getting 16K for it actually. The 7K could make sense to knock $100/month off the insurance, but you do actually get a service for that $100 a month, so don't completely discount that entirely, just discount most of it.
Does electric need to be so high?
I listed as a goal to get food down to $600 on my case study (from about $850), everyone told me $600 is still way too much, and to get it way down. I'm gonna have a hard time getting it below that I think, but I'll try and see what I can do. There's also a factor of "If I'm not eating well, why am I living?" Not sure what you think on it.
We're in roughly the same place in terms of net worth, though your income is somewhat (not hugely, not trivially) higher than mine, and when you include your asset secured expenses your expenses are MUCH higher than mine. Though part of that is increasing your net worth where as none of my expenses do that. The other thing is that your household is of 2, mine is of 1.
My plans, personally, are not to put any more than what gets matched in the 401K, and if my forex experiment works out I might put none there. I put money in my IRA for 2013 and 2014 in early 2014, and I will probably do the same for 2015 and 2016 in early 2016, but $5500/year isn't exactly a huge sum. For the student loans, I feel like you could go either way in terms of paying the minimums or paying it off quick. At 5.2%, it's not bad for a guaranteed return. I wouldn't bother ever paying more than the minimum for the house at 3.5%.
Not hugely profitable, but one thing I'm working on is amassing several credit cards, with the goal of as much cash back as possible.
Keeping $1500 in savings seems silly. That's for what, an emergency? You have credit cards, and you have at least 1 pay check to pay them off. You could just get rid of that $1500 and if you needed emergency money, put it on the card, and pay it back before any interest is due. If you wanted to be safe, so you have 9K in there, that might make sense. But $1500 is just pointless and does nothing for you. Might as well not have it.
