I'm a fellow Denver suburbanite, I recently found this incredible blog and started from the beginning about a month ago, working up to Feb of 2012 so far. I've learned a lot, and it's been a whirlwind month. This month alone, my wife and I sold our beastly 2012 Jeep gas guzzler through Craiglist with 5, count em, 5 $400 35 inch tires, taking us down to just a 2008 CRV we purchased used (we have 2 kids). We did not owe anything on the Jeep, so that $30k is being split 50/50 between the mortgage and investment accounts. We also purchased a bike trailer from CL as we're aonly about 3 miles from groceries, Home Depot, the library and the public pool. My wife is a stay at home mother and is really looking forward to putting that to use.
We dropped cable and switched to Centurylink for internet, saving about $60 a month and getting us away from the tv.
Then I looked at our Roth and 401k. We have about $250k in there, enough to easily fund a nice retirement with compounding at age 60 (I'm 36 and my wife it 32), so I cut contributions entirely to the Roth and dropped the 401k to 6% to get the full 1:1 match. Now it's time to build the pre-60 stash while rapidly paying off the remainder of our mortgage.
I like the idea of rebalancing and just took a look at that Vanguard fund that does it for you, but I'm wondering if there's a simpler way, especially when it comes to tax prep time. What if... instead of selling something that has posted a big gain, incurring taxes and possibly requiring you to pay attention to lots for tax basis, etc, you simply divert your new funds going forward to the assets that are low on the balance side. With our savings habits, we should have about $1500 a month to put into our Scottrade account. I figure I'll just keep an eye on my allocations and purchase more in the categories that are behind. Maybe that just doesn't work once balances are high enough, but starting out with about $20-30k (also moved our 6 months of "emergency" fund into the market), I would think I could keep it balanced without messing with selling and repurchasing.