Today marks the one week anniversary of the Samurai Alexa Rankings Challenge.

For those who aren’t familiar, Financial Samurai wrote a post last week encouraging bloggers to improve their Alexa ranking, propelling them to reach the top 200,000 ranked websites in the world. He called this group the Yakezie (pronounced yah-kay-zee).

He laid out several ways of doing this, including installing the Alexa toolbar, but the most important thing to come out of the post, in my opinion, was that we would create a small community of bloggers to encourage, help, and motivate each other to continue growing and moving up the list of top websites.

The Samurai Alexi Ranking Challenge Page

Today, I am publishing the Samurai Alexa Ranking Challenge page on the site that will track the progress of the Yakezie group each week. My hope is that the constant reminder will add motivation and help retain the intensity that we all have now.

The page shows the Alexa rank of all participants at the beginning of the challenge, last week, and this week. Also, we see our current rank within the group as well as last week’s rank. Finally, the site with the largest week over week gain will be highlighted.

Congratulations to Engineer Your Finances for this week’s top mover!

Come over to the Samurai Alexa Ranking Challenge page to keep track of everyone’s movement and for some weekly encouragement. But here’s a peek at what to expect. Come back next week to see how we’re doing!

This is a guest post by Bucksome, a baby boomer trying to make the most of her money while saving for retirement. Read more about her at Buck$ome Boomer’s Journey to Retirement. Subscribe to her RSS feed to follow new posts.

The common goal all people have when managing money is financial success. But what does that mean?

The dictionary definition of success is “the favorable or prosperous termination of attempts or endeavors“. Adding the adjective “financial” would mean positive results pertaining to money matters. There are many ways to measure monetary outcomes.

Debt Reduction

When I made the final car payment recently (six months early) it was a great feeling. Not as good as those who get to call up Dave Ramsey on debt-free Fridays but nice nonetheless. Reducing the debt load or eliminating a payment can be success to those with outstanding obligations.

I have short term and long term goals related to debt ranging from paying off consumer debt to burning the mortgage.

Savings

A second way to measure financial progress is savings. There are all kinds of vehicles people use to save ranging from emergency funds to retirement plans. You’ll see many personal websites with various savings tickers.

If you are out a debt, the next financial goal should be a fully-funded emergency fund. Daniel’s written about his goal to fund a $5,000 emergency fund. Saving for retirement will most likely be continual during working years.

Net Worth

If you have no debts and have met savings goals then net worth is the another way to measure financial progress. You’ll see blogs that regularly update the author’s net worth figure. The problem with this method is that it can be volatile.

Just ask anyone who owned real estate in Michigan, Nevada or California the past few years or invested heavily in the stock market. We saw a plummet in net worth which is still recovering.

Financial Success

Meeting your monetary goals however measured is what counts. For us, financial success will be a comfortable retirement with no debt and more than enough savings. I hope to see you there too!

I decided several months ago that I wanted to start investing, so I signed up with Schwab and started contributing automatically each month. It made sense, and I wanted to do SOMETHING, even if it wasn’t perfect.

Well, now I realize that it wasn’t perfect and I want to tweak my plan. I currently contribute to a Roth 401(k) through work but until Sunday, I hadn’t created a Roth IRA.

So my brilliant idea is to use the Roth IRA as an investing account! I can withdraw my contributions at any time (but not the earnings!) and if I want to withdraw the earnings, I’ll be able to take money from other places (reduce my 401(k) contributions for a few paychecks, dip into one of my sub-savings accounts) to make up for the interest I won’t withdraw from the Roth IRA. Essentially, I would keep my investing in a Roth IRA, earn tax free interest there, and withdraw that interest by making smaller 401(k) contributions equivalent to the amount of interest I earned but didn’t withdraw.

I think this is definitely the way to go. Why invest and pay taxes when I can invest and not pay taxes?? It seems like a no-brainer now, why didn’t I consider this as an option earlier?

So I set out to open my Roth IRA. Opening with Vanguard was so easy. It took less than 5 minutes. I had to start with $1,000 in a STAR fund, and I’m going to contribute as much as possible (after making my regular contributions to the emergency fund) until April 15, which is the cutoff date for 2009 contributions. Also, I’m stopping my Roth 401(k) contributions for the time being and using all that money to go toward the Roth IRA. That way I’ll be able to take full advantage of all my Roth options for the 2009 year. After my 2009 contribution window closes, I’ll contribute my regular 401(k) amounts to my 2010 Roth IRA plus the amount of any additional investing I want to do. Once I reach $5,000 of Roth IRA contributions in 2010, I’ll go back to contributing to my Roth 401(k) through work.

So why not just change my investments from Schwab brokerage to Roth IRA and leave the 401(k) alone? For flexibility. No matter what, I’ll always have my Roth IRA contributions to withdraw, penalty-free at any time. With a 401(k), there are rules for when I can withdraw, even the contributions, without penalty, and I wouldn’t qualify. So I’ll max out my Roth IRA contributions first because I see no reason not to.

My goal this year was to contribute $5,000 to my retirement funds, and that is a goal I will keep in mind. Anything above $5,000 will be my investing money, and at the end of the year, will just be my total contributions minus $5,000. Although it will seem like I am putting a lot of money away in retirement accounts this year, I will still have to remember that some of that money, while in a retirement account, will not be used for retirement purposes. But if I’m lucky, I won’t be tempted to withdraw it at all and will continue to take advantage of the tax-free interest I’ll be earning.