Currently viewing the tag: "Personal Finance"
Highlights from last month.
- The stock market keeps going up, and my investments keep benefiting. The gains appear to be slowing after the recent run up.
- Cash is down, which is annoying me. I owed $1600 in federal taxes, which pretty much killed any savings we might have accumulated this month, which is despicable. Look for a future post where I analyze my 2012 spending. It will be clear to you why a $1600 tax bill shouldn’t kill our monthly saving. Another reason this is down a bit is due to a purchase of two shares of Apple stock, which corresponds with a matching increase in investments.
- Another net worth record, besting last month’s record!
Highlights from last month.
- Investments are looking great again due to a fantastic start of the year for the stock market. I don’t expect this to last much longer given sequestration, plus the fact that the gains have to slow/stop/drop at some point. Nevertheless it’s nice to see my investments keep rising.
- Cash is up again, which is a pleasant surprise given the huge drop in credit card debt over the past two months. I would have expected cash to be down given the large CC bills we’ve been paying lately.
- It’s always nice to see the color green across the board in the Liabilities department.
- A nice $20,000 increase in two months. Wow! Again, these great gains can’t last forever, but even without the investment gains I’m still up ~$6,000 which is great to see.
- A new net worth record, besting the previous of $319,259 set in January of this year!
Highlights from last month.
- Great gains in cash this month, mostly due to receiving 3 paychecks instead of two. We’ve also done well in the spending department this month.
- Credit card debt is way up due to putting money against our next vacation. We’ve also paid about $1000 to carpet a portion of our basement, which I may carry on the card for a few months due to having 0% interest until next March.
- Finally Zillow said my house went up in value! The rapidity of change here seems extreme to me….
- Another finally: the car value change make sense, and by make sense I mean they actually dropped this month instead of gone up. I’m going to continue to carry the new car at cost until the NADA values it less than what I paid. Right now the NADA thinks it’s worth about $2k more than what I paid.
- This month is a new net worth record for me! I blew past the last one, which was May 2012, by about $8k. The gains were mostly due to stock market performance. It’s exciting to see such a large gain for the month!
I’m starting to realize that we here at BlogToAMillion are clearly not the best bloggers. No mid-month posts from either one of us. I blame work for my poor blogging performance. I’m actually back on a project that keeps me busy, grows my skills, and increases my visibility to management. When I’m engaged at work I don’t feel the desire to blog, which I guess is a good thing for me? Clearly it’s not good for the reader, but I don’t think we really have any so that’s ok 
. Anyway, this is the blog to read if you want to see monthly updates about two people’s finances that are making a concerted effort to grow their net worth! Plus you get the added benefit of potentially watching one or both of us crash and burn financially, because you never know what the future may hold.
Highlights from last month.
- I pretty much recovered all of the investment losses from the month of May in the month of June. Clearly some of this recovery was from automatic funding in my 401k and Roth, but either way I’m happy making a full recovery in a single month.
- Zillow continues to tell me my house is worth less and less. I’m not sure what to think about this. I need to discuss with Don about maybe tracking home prices at cost. I refuse to believe that home prices are that volatile, especially in the downward direction, in my area. Or maybe I’m just doing the Denial Twist on that one.
- I’ve had a nice cash recovery this month, but expect a drop again next month. That credit card debt needs to get paid off with something . This pile of credit card debt is mostly from some vacation and home improvement spending, which are both covered by targeted savings accounts. I never carry a balance, so I expect the CC debt to drop significantly this month unless I spend a significant amount on something else, like our next planned trip.
Given the fact that we had such a great cash month for what were then unknown reasons, I decided to get underway analyzing our spending situation for the month of March. Once I started, the reason for the large cash increase became obvious – I received 3 paychecks last month! I can expect another good (not as good as this one) month of April because my wife will be the one getting 3 paychecks. Nevertheless, the numbers:
Some people may notice that it appears as though I made money on daycare last month. Seems improbable (it is), and that’s because that row is actually conveying a different message. It’s positive because my childcare flex spending reimbursements are coming in. Since I fund a childcare spending account from my paycheck (income tax free!), that spending account money doesn’t show up in my take-home pay. Therefore, when we get reimbursed from that account for actual childcare expenditures, I’ve decided to apply it towards the Daycare spending row. Since the number is positive, that means we requested and received more reimbursements from prior weeks of daycare than we physically paid for in March. Eventually this will catch up, and most, if not all, future months should show a negative number in this row again. Maybe I should track the reimbursements as part of my income instead?
I have also had to reduce my guidance for my monthly General Savings. That’s because the prior guidance was unrealistic due to the daycare spending, so I dropped it to compensate. However, all daycare reimbursements are put right into savings, so in the end savings should be nearly as high as it was before. The problem is that I’m not funding the flex spending account as much as the daycare will charge for this year. This is a hedge against my wife deciding to stay at home and not work, and also because the daycare charges more than the government will allow you to fund in a flex spending account.
Other things I noticed while compiling this chart: groceries are still staggeringly large, dining out was significantly reduced (yay!), and paying two electric and gas bills this month hurt me a bit. I mentioned last month that I delayed paying a bill to wait for a paycheck to come in, so I ended up paying two in March.
Lastly, reconciling this with my Net Worth statement for the month, you’ll note that the Net Cash Flow added to the Scheduled Savings total approximates the gain in cash for the month that was shown in my Net Worth post. It’s not exact, mostly because I don’t want to spend the time checking every transaction to make sure it’s categorized appropriately . The fact that they’re close makes me pretty confident that I’m understanding where the bulk of my income/spending comes from/goes to.
Wow, I can’t believe I let Don beat me to the punch on the monthly net worth post. He must not have much real work to do or something….
- Wow, what a cash recovery this month! Don was bragging about his cash being up $1,400… try $3,400 on for size! I haven’t done the analysis yet, so I honestly don’t know where all of that came from. We definitely had a “good” spending month though, and I also cashed in about $650 worth of credit card cash back rewards.
- Green across the board, I’m lovin’ it! (OK not as much as I love McDonald’s, but still. Ba-dop-ba-ba-ba.) Granted, it’s a little shady that the value of my vehicles went up this month, but I think it’s due to the run up in gas prices. My small, fuel efficient car and motorcycle both went up a bit in value according to nadaguides.com. My wife’s car has not started depreciating yet (hah, yeah right!) since it’s a 2012 model. I’ll expect a substantial drop when it shows up as being a “used” car.
- I love watching the long term debt tick down each month. As long as you keep making payments then you will always have a positive influence on your net worth each month.
Wow, what a stressful money month. Recently I’ve come to realize that it takes about 2 months to pass large purchases through your monetary digestive tract, and it is very painful. Between Christmas gift purchases and the new car in January, combined with the fact that my wife missed a week of work (without pay) because of some minor surgery, and you can bring on the fiscal heartburn!
Now, after I’ve compiled the numbers, I don’t feel quite so bad. A solid 5% gain ain’t too shabby. Let’s just say that strong stock market returns are the Tums to some indulgent monetary overeating.
Highlights this month:
- The drop in cash and simultaneous drop in credit card debt signify us getting the final portion of the down payment on our new Explorer out of the debt pile, which feels good to say the least. We can finally start accumulating cash again without that big CC payment hanging over our heads.
- Another great month for the stock market equals another great month for my investments! However my investment gains come with a caveat: I had forgotten to track two stock investments that I have in past months. I’ve included them this month, and they show up as about $2300 of the gain. I will continue to track them in the future so they’re always shown in the trend.
- We crossed the $400,000 in assets milestone! Nice!
In other news… I’ll be paid 3 times in the month of March and my wife 3 times in April, so I expect to see some good cash accumulation if I can keep spending in control.
Highlights this month:
- Investments: Bam! What a great month on the stock market. My investments are way up this month mostly because of that. Hopefully the volatility in the market is slowing a bit so I can keep some of these gains for a little while.
- Cash: Ugh. Way down this month due to paying off Xmas gift credit card bills, as well as what seems to have been a glut of spending in January. I also used $500 in cash as a down payment on our new car.
- Credit Cards: Credit Card debt is up because of our recent car purchase. I put $2,500 of the down payment on a credit card to get the points. I will pay it all in full when the bill is due.
- Vehicle value is up quite a bit due to the new car. However, it’s more than offset by the new auto loan. Unfortunately we didn’t break even on the car purchase (a perfectly offset loan and new vehicle asset value) because I traded in my last vehicle instead of selling it to a buyer like I would normally due. I lost about $3,000 by trading instead of selling.
Edited 2/6/2012 – Fixed a calculation error in the net worth table. Also color formatted the table.
Don and I have decided to reevaluate how we put a value on our vehicles for our net-worth calculations. I have been using an average from Kelly Blue Book, NADA, and Edmunds that I haven’t updated in months. Who knows what Don was using….
Nevertheless, we have decided to standardize on using only NADA for our vehicle values. We came to this decision (1) to keep it simple and (2) NADA seems to be the only place that gives a value on campers, motorcycles, boats, and other vehicles. We will be using the retail value of the vehicle, adjusted downward by the condition of the vehicle. On NADA, they only adjust the trade-in value downwards, so we will take that adjustment and apply it to the retail value. The condition of the vehicle will be left up to the discretion of the individual.
Using this method, the total value of all of my vehicles changes from $43,645 to $42,071. This is both a result of the rule change and a result of finally updating them after a few months.
I would expect another change in my next monthly update due to a purchase of a new car for my wife. We no longer feel safe driving her current vehicle due to a recent incident, and are trading it in for a new car. Expect a post about that in the near future!
Happy New Year!
Highlights this month:
- Investments: Nothing new here, although I’ve been looking into a couple of different investment strategies. One is dividend stock investing, and another is the Permanent Portfolio. Both interest me, so look for posts in the future about these. Hopefully I can start to integrate some of this into my personal investing.
- Cash: Our savings for our next home keeps climbing! This month’s savings was boosted by a nice cash gift from my grandmother. Otherwise Christmas gift giving would have kept it fairly small. Thanks Grandma!
- Credit Cards: We’ve reached our goal with our Chase Sapphire card and gotten our 50,000 bonus points. $500 cash back here we come! I would expect our CC balance to be smaller in the coming months because we will no longer be working towards earning this bonus.
- Looks like we’ll be taking a hit in the vehicle department, as a problem with one of our current vehicles is forcing our hand. We’ll be purchasing a different vehicle in the next few weeks. Hopefully our house savings doesn’t take too big of a hit from this.
Donald
Age: 32
Assets: $401,669
Liabilities: ($129,290)
Net Worth: $272,379Memberships
Paul
Age: 31
Assets: 477,660
Liabilities: ($123,725)
Net Worth: $353,935
