Sussex county native and this made me laugh. I wouldn’t say there isn’t much to do, but there isn’t a lot of variety. If you live close to Route 80, you can be in Morristown in 35 minutes. Some great restaurants in Sparta. Just be thankful you didn’t have to grow up there 25 years ago.

The problem is that if I don’t contribute every paycheck, my employer stops matching, so I need to make sure it stretches the full year. I’m not sure if this is unique to my firm, but you may want to double check!

Well when you play selective time period, the s&p also had a negative 37% return in 2008 and negative 22% in 2002 so if you were invested in that time period you would have done very poorly. The annualized average for the S&P for 20 year returns since recorded is less than 8%. Sure that’s higher than 5% but you can’t know if you’re investing at a good time or a bad time. So no it’s not a bad choice to pay down loans which you know will accrue interest over investing and hoping that you’re lucky and investing at a time where you’ll get a better rate of return. It’s not about being bad at math it’s having different risk tolerance levels.

Most employers will stop you from going over. My husband has always had his as a percentage and hasn’t changed it through about 5 years of raises and promotions. Honesty, when he stops contributing in the fall, we enjoy the year end boost for holiday shopping and end of year charitable giving. And the sooner it goes in, the more it has time to earn interest!