Personal Balance Sheet, April 2008: Net Worth +3.81%, Passed $50K

May 5th, 2008

Each month, I post an analysis of my finances and my end-of-month net worth. For more on why I do this, please take a look at my explanation post.

April was another great month of growth and the 2nd highest growth since I started tracking at the beginning of the year. But, unlike past months, the majority of this month’s growth came from investments.

I played with the data presentation again, and came up with a better way to display the concentrated data to remove the distractions of up-and-down accounts. Here’s what I came up with for April:

Overview

Assets

April was a good month for nearly everyone, it appears. The S&P 500 was up 4.75% over the month and our investments show that. Collectively our investments grew by 8.04%, but that does include my withholdings. Since I don’t track the 401(k) investment growth separately from the added value due to my withholdings, I don’t know exactly what my market gains were, but I’m happy with the results and an 8% growth still feels like a pure 8% growth since I never see the money that gets deposited anyway.

Cash-wise, April showed nominal growth of 2.88%, mostly due to the timing of payments taken out of our checking account. The true value of our checking account at the end of April as noted by Quicken was nearly $600 less than what was reported by the bank, but to keep the data consistent I only track the balances listed by the bank for the purposes of this exercise. This is one method I may revisit in the future since it has shown inflated values each month since I started tracking it.

Our fixed assets shrunk this month due to the quarterly recalculation of the estimated value of our vehicles. Surprisingly, it appears the truck increased in value, but I have a feeling this is due to my inconsistency of marking vehicle features on the Kelley Blue Book site and not an actual increase in potential resale value. On a related note, we will be getting a new appraisal of our house sometime this month since we have to challenge yet another erroneous property value assessment by the county - more on that in another post.

Liabilities

It was an unremarkable month for our liabilities. No extra payments were made, so all the balances dropped by the expected amounts. With the new baby on the way, our debt repayment methods are changing, so I’m guessing most months will appear just like this one - standard payments for all debt, but nothing spectacular.

May will bring one major change, though: We will be making extra payments to the student loans to cover the accrued interest from our underpayments for the year and we will be increasing our monthly payments to $140 each to ensure that we don’t underpay again. Additionally, we have not yet fully decided what to do with the tax rebate, so we may put that toward debt repayment or store it away for a down payment on the vehicle we plan to buy sometime next year.

Net Worth

With a surprise surge of growth in my 401(k), we broke the $50K net worth barrier a month earlier than expected! This month, our net worth grew by 3.81%, pushing our year-to-date growth to 11.93%. I’m not sure what else this year has in store, but if it looks anything like this, I’m all in!