Starting in April I decided I was going to proactively do at least one thing to better my personal finance situation at the most basic of levels. This provides me the opportunity to get back to the roots regarding my personal finance situation. It is easy to take your eye off the ball after running a PF blog for 8 years! In May I finally filed my taxes. This was the first year I filed an extension, and while it was not a huge deal next year I will high to make my appointment a lot earlier! In addition, I finally finished up my April step forward by finalizing my switch to Allstate from State Farm saving about a $1,000/yr. for 20 minutes of work.
At the beginning of each month I calculate the increase or decrease in my net worth month over month and year to date. I am not comfortable putting the actual number out on the internet for all to see, so what I did a few years ago was create my spreadsheet and zeroed out the net worth so that just the gain is being published.
Calculating my Net Worth
My Assets
- My Cash Savings Accounts – I only really count my emergency savings since everything else is ear marked to be spent elsewhere. This number was where I wanted it for about 18 months, but in April I had my daughter‘s Christening so I ate into this amount. In the Greek culture a Christening is a pretty big deal, and to the dismay of The Wife, I had a pretty big party to match. I have to focus getting it back up as quickly as possible.
- My 401(k) – Just keep throwing part of my paycheck at my 401(k) even though I sort of hate my 401k. For the past few months I have been buying and selling within this account…I just posted my actual returns from this pure market timing technique.
- Random Non-Qualified Investment Accounts – This thing has TUMBLED but I am proud to announce I am DONE with gambling on penny stocks. My gambling will be kept to casinos (and some of my holdings in my investment club).
- Wife’s Non-Qualified Account – In this monthly post for the past few years I would lump this in with the random qualified accounts, but this is not how I kept my records. So I have partitioned it out for future posts, and recaptured some Disney stock which was in a UTMA account for The Wife despite her being 34 years old. The “recapture” created a noticeable big bump in November of last year. In addition to her $DIS stock she owns 2 broad based index funds.
- The Wife’s Roth IRA – This account only holds to 2 funds. An index fund of the market and a dividend paying fund.
- My Dividend Investment Portfolio – Easily my favorite part of my financial
empirehut. - Home Value – A lot of bloggers seem to stress over home value. In my old place I just rounded to a number that I thought I’d sell for (I was off by less than 1%). I am just going to keep using my purchase price for at least the next year or two. No real reason to worry about it as I am not going anywhere any time soon.
- My Traditional IRA – I was actively trading this account also, but I made the financial confession that I was speculating in some really shitty stocks.
My Liabilities
- My Mortgage – Every so often I think about putting money towards the mortgage but I always back off.
- Law School debt – A while back I paid off the much smaller of the loans I have a while before this category makes any significant moves.
- Credit Card debt – All at 0%
My Net Worth Growth
- From May 205 my net worth increased .79%
- For 2015 my net worth has stayed relatively even at -.27%
How was your month?
