Net Worth Update February 2019

I have been keeping track of my net worth and sharing my gains and losses on here for years.  Honestly, I can’t believe how long it took me to start tracking my net worth.  I am not sure how many people actually track their assets and debts outside of the personal finance world, but I am sure that if more people did the state of America’s finances would be in a better place.

Thoughts Before Calculating: I usually have a feeling as to how my family has done over the past month.  The past few updates were rough mainly due to end of year spending and the atrocious markets.  Given that there has been a tear in the past week or two I am pretty sure this is going to be a really good month.  In addition, I have started to implement net worth gains that are not correlated with the market.  In particular paying off long term debt at a MUCH quicker pace than I have in the past as well as adding to my whole life insurance and gold stock pile.

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!
• 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.  In January I moved a good portion of this account to cash, not because of marketing timing but because we may have a liquidity need that I don’t want to be beholden to a time like Q42018.
• My House – I increased the value of my home starting in 2018 3%.  I have decided to leave it flat in 2019, if The Wife and I sell it it’ll just add a large jump in the net worth statement.
• My Traditional IRA – Just a few stocks that have captured my attention.
• Physical Gold – In 2018 I decided on buying 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.
• Cryptocurrency 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.
• Cash Surrender Value Life Insurance – I am not a “buy term and invest the difference” kind of guy. Mainly because no one actually invests the difference! I have been building my Cash Surrender Value for a number of years, but I never captured it on these statements.  Starting this year I’ll be adding/updating this line item.

My Liabilities

• My Law School Loans – I still have a significant amount of law school loans but 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 $35,000 it would be a tremendous hit to liquidity.  I figured out last year that my student loan company, NELNET, was misapplying my extra payments but that is all fixed now.
• 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 is my American Express Premier Gold Card, whose fee I fight every year.  I open and close other cards to get ridiculous offers but right now I am rolling out of them with nothing on the horizon.
• 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).  Starting last month, I have been putting a lot of cash flow into paying this asset down.  Without a substantial change this will take years to pay off, but after last quarter’s shit show I realized I am not comfortable with this much debt on my books, even at ridiculously low rates.  I am not sure I’ll keep up with it for the entire calendar year, but right now it is my plan.

Net Worth Increase/Decrease

• From January 1st to February 1st my net worth Increased 16.25%. 
• Since we are only a month deep my year to date growth is the same.

Ummm, I did not expect that type of growth at all.  I took a look back at some of my spreadsheets and I don’t think I ever had a double digit jump month over month.  Almost all of the gains came from two accounts, my Dividend Growth Income Portfolio (some of my naked puts turned around, mainly my WYNN puts I have been rolling for months) and my 401(k).  Interestingly, my 401(k) despite 3 or 4 months of added contributions still isn’t as high as it was back in Q32018.

How was your month?