With another month in the books I get the pleasure of updating my net worth spreadsheet and then sharing how I have done month over month and year to date.
Thoughts before I calculate my net worth: I usually have a feeling as to how I did with regard to my net worth. I think this month is going to be a down month. We had a couple of unexpected bills (my dog passing was $800 on credit card that I just was not expecting), and just overall The Wife and I have been spending a lot with my online income decreasing the past 45 to 60 days for some reason.
My Net Worth Calculation
My Assets
My assets are pretty simple:
- Emergency Fund – The Wife and I keep this at an amount that we believe is a real emergency amount rather than a specific amount linked to monthly expenditures.
- My Dividend Growth Account – I am finally back into undervalued dividend growth investing and I am very excited to share my screens and purchases! I decided last month to take the record keeping of this account a bit more serious than I have for the past 18 months.
- My Wife’s Roth IRA – Nothing special – just a mixture of cheap index funds and individual companies that capture my attention.
- My 401(k) – I still have about 50% of my contributions going into cash. I am not entirely convinced that this marketing timing is worthwhile given my age (36) and the fact that the account can’t be touched for 24 years at the minimum. In last month’s net worth update I wrote (to myself), “I think after this month I am going to slow down the cash contributions and get back to a balanced investment approach.” I never changed the allocation. This is the month I will.
- Wife’s Mutual Funds – This was an amount that was given to my wife from her deceased grandparents. They were horribly mismanaged until I stepped in, putting them in low expense vanguard mutual funds. She and I both look at this account as a super emergency fund.
- My House – I increased the value of my home starting in 2018 3%. This was the first time since I bought the home that I even bothered to increase the value.
- My Traditional IRA – Just a few stocks that have captured my attention.
Wife’s Business – NEW IN 2018– Just going to value this at the cash that is on the books at the end of every month. There won’t be a distribution for quite sometime, so hopefully, there is a nice trend upwards.- Physical Gold – Earlier this year I decided that I would buy a small amount of physical gold every month or two. After doing some quick math, I am getting killed in transaction costs. I set up a capital one 360 account to save the amount I would be buying in gold and I will make a larger purchase less often.
- Crytocurrency Account – Earlier this year I bought a tiny amount of Bitcoin. By the time my initial payment cleared bitcoin had dropped 40%. I am not exactly sure what I am going to do with this account just yet. Right now I am going to ignore it.
My Liabilities
- My Law School Loans – Despite being 36 years old I have a significant amount of law school loans left. They are locked in at 3.5%, so I have no real rush to pay them off. I’d like to get the monthly cash flow back but at about the $40,000 it would be a tremendous hit to liquidity.
- My Mortgage – I live on Long Island (and it’s on, not in) so the odds of me ever prepaying this down, especially with a 3.375% 30yr fixed is unrealistic.
- Credit Cards – My favorite card was my American Express Premier Gold Card, whose fee I fight every year. I also have some minor outstanding balances that I’ll just pay down slowly. I just recently opened up an American Express Platinum Card for 60,000 points and a lot of benefits for the first year.
- My HELOC – A good portion of it was to capitalize The Wife’s Business. I decided to keep the debt of the HELOC on the balance sheet, but ignore the corresponding asset (the removed checking account).
My Net Worth Increase/Decrease
- From July 1st to August 1st my net worth increased 1.42%
- Year to date my net worth has increased 6.9%
Shockingly (and happily), my gut was wrong, but only because of market tail winds. My debt levels stayed about the same month over month so it was just the natural ebbs and flows of the market that pushed me higher.
