Personal Balance Sheet, May 2008: Net Worth +42.15%!
Filed under: Personal Balance Sheet
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.
May was an uncommonly, unconventionally successful month. Unfortunately, most of the “growth” was from money we technically already had but weren’t tracking.
Here’s the overview for May:
Overview
Assets
While May felt like a good investing month, the S&P 500 was actually down 0.5% over the month. Even with this downturn in the market, our investments collectively gained 7.29% (including my withholdings). Last month we grew 8.04%, so the slight downturn apparently affected us very little. But this month, our investments aren’t the real news.
Upon receiving our new property appraisal, we were able to push our home value to $221,000 - a gain of $15,000. In reality, this value gain should have been spread over the last 2 years, but we just now became aware of the value change. I’m not comfortable forecasting property value growth, especially in this market, so it’s unlikely I will be able to update this amount again until we either sell this house or are forced to pay for a new appraisal to fight yet another property tax increase.
Because of this increase in property value, we finally reached 80% loan-to-value on our mortgage and home equity. We convinced our credit union to release our property tax escrow. We received a check for $4,080 this week that went to savings. As I stated before, this is money that was technically ours to begin with, but we were not tracking it. This doesn’t represent a gain in net worth, but more like our data’s starting to catch up to our real value.
If you factor in this “growth” of $19,080, our true growth over the month was only $1,428.53 - a much more reasonable amount considering past growth.
Liabilities
It was yet again an unremarkable month for reducing our liabilities. It was a better month than average, but our total drop was only $901.11. As I noted last month, we’ve been forced to move back to mostly standard payments for our debts in order to keep up our capital for when the new baby arrives. Hopefully by the time it arrives in December, our backup and emergency funds will be fully funded and ready to tackle any unexpected issues.
I am so looking forward to paying off something. At this point, I just need that little psychological boost that comes with removing a line item from my books. It appears that the Lowe’s credit card will be the first to go, as was expected. Maybe if we can find some extra snowflake money, we’ll be able to do some more bonus payments on our car loan…
Net Worth
It’s strange to say it, but our tracked net worth grew by 42.15% this month. One month after breaking the elusive $50K net worth barrier, we’ve blown through two more barriers to achieve a new net worth of $72,207.01! Year-to-date, we’ve grown 59.10%. Not bad!
I’ve added a new graph on my sidebar to show my net worth growth. It’s nice to see that huge bump this month and I hope that keeping that graph there helps motivate me to keep pushing.
June 2nd, 2008 at 11:42 am
I really like your format for tracking your net worth. Do you happen to keep a monthly budget, or are you just tracking your net worth from month to month?
June 2nd, 2008 at 1:05 pm
We ditched our budget after a few unfortunate circumstances that our previous budget wasn’t built to accommodate and haven’t yet gotten around to building a new one. We’ve been tracking our expenditures meticulously as well, so we probably have enough data with which to build one - we just haven’t made the time to do it.
June 3rd, 2008 at 8:29 am
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