I first started tracking my net worth and then sharing my gains and loses way back in January 2013. I absolutely regret not starting earlier, especially when this site was started a few years prior! I believe that every adult would benefit from seeing how their short term personal finance decisions are playing out over the course of a month, months or years, and the easiest way to do that is with a net worth statement.
Thoughts before calculating: I usually have a feeling of how my net worth has performed for the prior month. Usually it is based on market performance or if I know The Wife and I had a particular high spend month. For the past two months, I have watched my net worth plummet because of both categories! Well, I finally think the spending has slowed and the market has recovered a bit at the end of November, so I believe that this is going to be a pretty good month.
My Net Worth Calculation
My Assets
My assets are pretty simple:
- Emergency Fund – My goal is to keep an amount in cash that The Wife and I believe is needed for a real emergency amount rather than a specific amount linked to monthly expenditures. At this point it is a quite a bit lower than I’d like it to be.
- 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 a few months ago 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 finally just reallocated future contributions after discussing it for a few months.**
- 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.
* – This account is also where I sell naked puts, so when market volatility reared it’s ugly, ugly head this particular account got decimated in terms of percentages. Currently, I am holding two large positions in BUD and WYNN, as well as very in the money puts. My plan is to keep selling covered calls on those positions, and hopefully I’ll be able to keep rolling the puts until they are out of the money (if I get prematurely put the underlying equity I’ll sell covered calls).
** – ahhhh the 401(k). Easily, my largest non-real estate account, so it took the biggest plunge in the past 60 days. I am about 84% equities the account took a nose dive! I am nearly 37, run a personal finance blog, and work in a financial planning office I am not about to sell out into the dip, but holy shit does it hurt when doing this exercise monthly!
My Liabilities
- My Law School Loans – Despite being
3637 years old I have a significant amount of law school loans left. The loans 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 $35,000 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, but in January of last year I opened up an American Express Platinum Card for 60,000 points, and last month I opened up an American Express Delta card to get $200 off our recent trip to Atlanta and I got an extra 40,000 delta miles (not sure how that translates to the Amex points yet). I’ll be canceling the Platinum card in January because I can’t justify the $500/yr membership costs.
- 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 HELOC was used to clean up some outstanding debt I couldn’t take of on the consumer side quick enough. So the balance increased but overall rolling debt didn’t move that much. I have also shifted extra dollars weekly to be moved over to pay it down quicker. I am hoping that if I get a decent bonus at work and/or if The Wife has a decent last quarter I can throw a good chunk at it.
My Net Worth Increase/Decrease
- From November 1st to December 1st my net worth increased 2.10%
- Year to date my net worth has increased 3.09%
Much better than last’s month loss of -7.70% but still the year to date is a bit disappointing.
