A tepid May, in terms of the markets, the weather, and most things going on. And that is absolutely fine!
Our NW increased by over $12k. Cash balance is inching towards the red line of $100k.
One slight change we’ve incorporated into our monthly posts is to do away with anything after the decimal. A simple format change in Excel and I don’t know why we didn’t do this earlier! The tables looks way cleaner now.
Last month we also tracked ALL of our variable spending, to the last penny. We know on average how much we spend and we are both very conscious about discretionary expenses but this was the first month we tracked and consolidated the outflow. This is how it looks like. We won’t be posting this information every month but rather show some extraordinarily high or low months. May was probably lower than average.
Summer is here! Hope all of you reading this will get to enjoy the next few glorious months. Cheers!
Cash balance has increased to almost $94k, which is I N S A N E! Two major influx of funds: tax refund of about $3.2k and the third stimulus check. We will not let this go over $100k!
Major expenses for the month was $3.8k we had to fork out for some long awaited dental work for M. We also paid about $850 extra towards our mortgage this month.
We are dutifully enjoying the weather – highs of 60s and lows of 40s make for wonderful time to spend and sweat out in the sun. We will continue this trend, even when the temps rises, in May.
The pandemic, here in the US, seems to be drawing towards a close. In other parts of the world, its rearing his ugly monstrous head in painful fashion. Our hearts go out to those in the front line of the attacks.
Another month, another $45k increase in net worth. This is getting boring. Yawn … 😀
On a serious note, I’ll take this nicely purring along markets any day. Or month. We’ll make hay while the sun shines. And when the inevitable correction does come – in a week/month/year – we will take advantage of that too and throw more of the stockpiled cash at it.
Cash reserve increased further as W’s sizeable annual bonus came through. Quite soon we’ll be sitting on a pile of doing-no-good $100k. That’s ok. This would more than carry us for a year if all our sources of active income stopped suddenly one day. Some of it is earmarked for vacations (that we didn’t take in 2020, and some that we will take in ’21 and beyond), some for taxes (that we thought we’d owe; but no, for the first time since we got married, we’ll get a refund!), some for property taxes (escrow that has been decoupled from our mortgage, and we pay directly to the county twice a year).
Another milestone: FI funds for the first time crossed the million dollar mark. This is funds that we can literally live off. I’ll have to sit down and do an analysis on what is the optimal value of this metric for us, but I have a feeling that $1.5M should be sufficient.
Spring is here. Green is sprouting from the depths of the grey and brown. Just two more months till school wraps up and summer starts. Life is – to borrow a mechanical analogy already used in this post – purring along nicely. Cheers!
Markets swing in the right direction was the main cause of the increase.
February, as mentioned in the last post, was a deep freeze. Spring, though, has come early here in March. There have been already 60°F days! We’ve started taking walks and bike rides. Vaccines are around the corner. Life is good.
The last week of January, with the Game Stop fiasco, kinda spoiled the month for us. We eked out a meager $1,900 of growth.
As mentioned in December we’re debuting a new look in our monthly reporting. Hope this is easier on the eyes. (To us, in our Excel doc this looks pretty good. The jpg version on here might not be the most fresh-est)!
We’ve introduced a sub group in the Assets class. This is the combined value of our retirement, brokerage, and cash. Basically all that is fairly liquid and will grow – in other words, our FI (Financial Independence) or FU money.
Net worth is good to track but if both of us ever decided to call it total quit from any kind of money making endeavor, the FI value will be the true determining factor.
Major expense in January included $837 for the semi-annual insurance premium for our two vehicles and $200 for M’s yearly Mint Mobile charge. That amounts to $16.67 monthly charge for 4GB of 4G LTE. Hard to beat!
As I type this out on Feb 13, we’re in the middle of a deeeeeep freeeeeeze. We’re talking about sub 0 temps, with wind chills reaching -30° F!
A pretty good year for us, at least financially! After various ups and downs over the course of the year, Net Worth increased (net) by over $179k for the year, and in July for the first time ever, we *officially* became millionaires 😀
This increase is lower than the increase of $231k in 2019 but a lot was different.
Like a godforsaken pandemic different.
We effectively going to a single income family different.
Since we started tracking and documenting our financial journey from beginning of 2017, we’re amazed how far we’ve come. In January 2017, our net worth stood at $458k. In 4 full years, we are at $1.135m. Incredible!
This year we also refinanced our old 30-year 3.875% fixed mortgage (which we were in year 5), to a 15-year 2.625% fixed. In the process, we decoupled the escrow for property tax, and our monthly mortgage payments now go only towards principal and interest, with the payment amount remaining almost same as before the refinance. To give you an idea of how much interest we were paying on the 30-year note: only 52% of the monthly PI payment was going towards principal, whereas now 68% of the monthly payment go towards principal.
Goals for 2021 will be soft. After the year that was 2020 we need a *normal* year – plain, old fashioned, boring – to calm things down.
We obviously have no control over how the markets behave. What we do have control over is how we invest our money and how disciplined we stay. To that end, these are the numbers we hope to hit (contributions to different accounts):
401(k) – About $15k
IRA’s – $12k (this might be the stretch goal)
Taxable brokerage – $3k
529: $2k
Non-financially, here are the few things we’d like to do this year.
Meet up with friends and family!
Go on at least one long road trip of 7 to 10 days
Have couple of more shorter ones
Enjoy the summer
Hopefully have a number of cookouts at our place and few more at friends’ places
Kayaking
Maybe one trip involving air travel
International perhaps ..
Here’s hoping to an amazing 2021 everyone! May your life, and journey towards FIRE, be a glorious one.
A good month to wrap up the year. And what a year it was.
After November’s explosion of $91k increase in net worth, this month’s jump was a mere $39k 😀 It happens. Readers will also know that we’ve had months of $53k and $75k loss. We’ll do a yearly review post shortly.
This December was quiet. After some suspenseful days for D, we eventually got enough snow for a white Christmas! We spent socially distanced time for the holidays. Never more than with one other family. Good food was had and time was cherished with loved ones.
Here’s hoping to a better year for everyone, cheers!
When we made decision that M would leave the high paying corporate job for low key part time jobs, we obviously knew this was bound to happen and anticipated this change. The goal was to net around $1k a month. That has been achieved, and more!
M worked a total of 8 jobs. Maybe we’ll do a post of all the jobs that are available, and not soul sucking, for part time work and can supplement in FIRE.
This year was the first Thanksgiving we spent with …just us. No other family members or friends. That was a little harder on D, and fellow cousins, but like a heavyweight prize fighter they shook off the latest punch landed by this incredible year and and continued on with life 🙂 We had a quiet time at home, sequestered, and eating all kind of yummy food.
Now, to numbers. Markets have been on tear this November. The Dow crossed over 30,000 last week. With that our assets, and consequently our Net Worth, have soared to new heights. We had over $91k gain! Sure we’re still padding our 401(k), Roth IRA, and 529 accounts – but that is minuscule to the gains our existing assets are experiencing.
We also realize that it might come crashing down in December.
But.
The long term trajectory of the markets is …upwards.
Couple of things I should be working on in December, with regards to this blog. I have to figure out our “Income” post for this year! W’s is much easier as that’s just one W-2. With M, it gets a bit complicated. With no full time job, and a bunch of part time jobs – some which are independent contract-type work – pulling all the information will take some work. My educated guess would be around $15k. We’ll see.
Second thing, I want to categorize and bucket our Net Worth reporting in a way that will reflect our FI – or FU money (wonderful, profanity ridden piece done by the “Godfather” of FIRE movement, none other than J L Collins) – funds and maybe assign a target for that. This will bring more clarity to us, and hopefully, our readers.
Cheers to good times ahead!
[Just heard our Governor declare that Christmas will be a lot like Thanksgiving. Gotta make another run to the liquor store!]
With the markets dropping steadily since Oct 12, our assets have taken a beating last month. I’m not sure how we held on to the “millionaire” status 😀
The only major expense in October was $295 for a phone. That’s about it.
Not a whole lot going on in October other than schools – in hybrid learning mode – going on, wrapping up of fall sports, Halloween, and settling in for winter.
