November Net Worth Update

After a month of blogging about the economy being one big toilet flush, I tallied up my net worth for November and my jaw dropped. My November net worth is $28,570, a loss of $442. My chart looks like the black diamond side of Aspen Snowmass. Thank god I saved money for Christmas gifts. There are rumors the Fed is looking to lower interest rates again. I'm going to move most of M and our savings into 6 month CDs just in case.

Okay, so even though every month like clockwork I put a dinky amount of money into my Roth, and pay down my student loan, until last month when I started posting my net worth I never really paid attention to it. All I knew was that I saved the annual max for my Roth, I paid X amount on my student loan to pay it off in half the time, I saved for a rainy day (and sure enough it poured), and I knew I paid off my credit cards in full every month. Which is why I felt like I didn't need to do a net worth in the first place. I was doing all I could, and frankly I didn't want to see how low my net worth was after all that.

But as I said last month, it makes sense to track my progress. Or my retreat, as it turns out. Because you see the real effects of the bigger picture. For example, my Roth IRA lost $805 in one month! I thought that was kind of staggering given that there's only sixteen grand and change in there. But then my ING gained over a hundred dollars in interest alone, and my student loan shrank by over 8%, so jaw dropping aside, the overall damage was minimized to a loss of 1.52% this past month. It puts perspective on the headlines, and the panic, and the depressed interest rate on my savings account, and it re-enforces the multiplicity of financial health. Save, invest, pay off debt. Here's to hoping for a December rebound to push me over the $30K mark!