April Net Worth

Well, I'm back to thirty thousand. $30,589 to be exact, an increase of 3.88%. It's so dinky, yet I feel so warm and fuzzy. I love being in the black...

I know I should have other goals, like a good pf blogger, but right now I'm just trying to gather enough together to max out my Roth IRA every month. It's seriously putting a dent into my cheeseburger budget, but I guess it's important to be able to even afford a cheeseburger when I'm seventy. Of course, when I'm seventy I'll probably be banned from eating cheeseburgers because, well, I ate too many for sixty nine years.

But back to the relevant stuff. M and I do save every month in our ING savings accounts, so I guess those count as goals.

$100 christmas fund (gifts and travel)
$100 car fund (for surprise repairs and a "new" used car in 5+ yrs)
$100 gym fund (annual gym membership for both of us)
$100 vacation fund (tax returns pad this fund, we go away a lot...)
$200 emergency fund
=$600/month in ING

It might seem like a lot, but remember it's a joint account, so really my share is only $300. Better to pay a savings account that much rather than Amex.

At least once a year four of those funds get drained (not the emergency fund, if life is kind), which is why my net worth spiked in December and then took a tumble. But I kind of figured out what things really killed my credit card every year, and just decided to save for them instead. So far it's worked out. Plus, now that those infamous stimulous checks are on their way, my savings account has a small something to look forward to.

March Net Worth

Egads, it's more than a week into April already! Well, better late than never.

$29,446- almost thirty but not quite. I had a slight rebound, mostly due to the market. But it's still behind the December high point. That's okay, I'm more obsessed with the savings account, which got a boost because I saved one of my freelance paychecks. I was torn between bumping up our savings account or opening up an individual 401k, and decided on the cushion. I'm still going to check out the individual 401k plans, and I'll get back to you on what I find.

I would just like to make one last comment on this whole net worth thing. I still find it weird that I post my net worth, despite the fact that the voyeur in me enjoys reading other posts on it. Which is why, I guess, I do it to begin with. I kind of have fun figuring it out every month. But back to my one last comment.

I looked on the comparison report tab of the NetworthIQ program, and folks, my net worth is sad. And how do I feel about this? Okay, really. So people my age have, on average, hundreds of thousands of dollars more in net worth. But then, that's the funny thing about doing net worth calculations every month. In the end, it's all relative. Even though it's a numbers game, it's also about your own life, and your own progress bars. So even though my peers in age, income, zip code, etc. squash my little net worth bar, I'm cool with that.

February Net Worth

Egads. $26,566. Sigh. At least I'm buying low...

There were some health related expenses, so a bite came out of the ING. On a positive note, I picked up some extra freelance work, so that should replenish the savings account a bit next month.

It's been a pretty frugal month. I definitely feel like all the bad economic news has prevented me from doing stuff I used to do-- like go to the movies. Every week I would walk to downtown Brooklyn's big movie theater and see a matinee ($7.50!) and get free popcorn on Tuesday. Instead, I've overworked our Netflix queue and have marched M to the mailbox after midnight to make next morning's pickup. I've done my freelance writing in the Brooklyn Public Library instead of the local coffeehouse. I dropped $40/month off the phone bill and lowered the cell phone by $10/month. And I've tried not to eat out so much. Maybe once a week, at most. Then there's the iTunes Dependency Syndrome, the pièce de résistance of my mind's disorderly buffet. (clearing throat), excuse me, now, while I go download the soundtrack from "Into the Wild"...

February Net Worth (ouch)

$29,715 with a big fat zero in liabilities. Well, fine, okay, M has the mortgage on our place, but if I'm not counting the home value then I'm not counting the mortgage. And no, Citibank can't have it.

Is there any good news to losing a few thousand in a month? Well, I paid off my student loan with money from an ING CD that came due, I took out another $1,000 to pay for M and my gym membership for the year from an ING account that we save $ in every month for precisely that purpose, and the stock market has gone twister on me which means I'm forced into buying low. Waaaaay low.

It's okay, I'm not worried. Besides, I'm still on post-student-loan-payoff high :)

December Net Worth Update

First off, I'd like to say Happy New Year to everyone, but especially Sun Microsystems. May 2008 give me better memory...

You see, several years back I bought a handful of Sun shares when they were below five bucks a pop. I was buying stocks like Imelda bought shoes, a parallel I do not encourage others to emulate. But that was then. And now, I apparently have the mental dexterity of one approaching senility, because I forgot that I had these shares. Well, not really forgot. I just thought, oh, they're still in the gutter because, well, isn't everything else? So I'm doing my networth for the month and I log on to my Sharebuilder account just for kicks. I had previously just lumped my Sharebuilder stocks into my other stocks, a static three grand (a lowball figure) until I figure out how to access all the DRIP accounts. My eyes bulged when I saw that I had tripled my paltry amount of shares, and when I checked out its pricing chart for the past year I saw a Bette Davis style bumpy ride. Talk about buy and hold on for dear life...

So on the day oil hits $100 a barrel for the first time in history, I give you my net worth. Which, I proudly announce, hit $30k for the first time. $31,135 to be exact... Woo-hoo!

photo by kosare via flickr

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!

October Net Worth

I was resistant to posting my net worth, not for reasons of privacy (or lack thereof), but because I thought it would be too depressing. Then I realized, what they hey, everybody else is doing it! And now I kind of like it. I like that I have a little reminder once a month to track my progress. So I bring you October's net worth to the tune of $29,012.

But here's the sad part, I only started saving six years ago. Before that I was pissing away my money on food and fun and cleaning up a shattered credit score. For the first two years I slowly increased my monthly contributions until I was able to contribute the $4,000 maximum. All of my retirement savings are wrapped up in a Roth IRA because I've never worked in a place that offered 401Ks and matching contributions and paid vacations. Ah, the good life. I am soooo jealous of your matching contributions! I would guess that most bartenders and wait staffers have no clue that such a thing exists. Not only do employers pay you, they help you save money too. Weird.

I think that by the end of the year I'll hit thirty grand, woo hoo! A note about my calculations. I'm admittedly lazy and so there's some stock that isn't listed, which is why it's stuck at $3,000. Also, it is standard to put the value of your home's equity into a net worth equation. I left it out because it would dramatically skew my net worth and give me a false sense of savings. Also, while M and I save together, I only included my own retirement savings, stocks, and land. Oh yeah. The land. That was a very, um, irrational late night purchase on eBay years back. It's a piece of desert in Arizona. According to google earth it looks pretty. Not that I've ever been there... And you all thought I was financially astute!