Personal Balance Sheet, June 2008: Net Worth +0.30%
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.
Let’s not sugar coat it, investments in June sucked! The markets were down collectively around 9% over the month and are now down around 14% over the first half of 2008. With the dramatic drop in the market, it’s a wonder I was able to pull out a positive net worth change at all.
Here’s how June ended up for us (click to expand):
Overview
Assets
June’s markets were sour and our investments showed it. Collectively, our investment balances dropped 5.44% since last month, even though I contributed $353.92 to my 401(k) through withholding. It’s just hard to imagine that yet again, I’ve lost more in value than what I contributed. At least that helps me drive down my cost basis as I buy more at these lower levels. Hopefully, I’ll be able to scrape together the $3,000 I need to reach my stretch goal of setting up a Vanguard account while the market’s down.
Outside of investing, we were able to push $525 to savings over the course of the month. It’s nice to know that the snowflake money we have coming in and my other side income is starting to make a difference.
Due to the dramatic decline in our investments, our non-fixed assets shrunk by 1.56% over the month, but I’m not too concerned because I know where our money has been going (hint: the liabilities) and our income is slowly growing due to this blog and my other endeavors.
Liabilities
Some extra “found cash” helped us accelerate our debt payments a bit this month. I was able to pay extra on the home equity loan with a little of the escrow money that I didn’t move out of my credit union’s savings. That allowed me to pay an extra $100 and shave another month off of the end of that loan. In the two years we’ve been paying on this home equity loan, we’ve been able to save ourselves 39 months of payments by paying over the minimum. That has effective cut our 15-year loan to less than 12.
In addition to the extra payment toward the home equity loan, we also put extra money toward our student loans. There were a few months that we deferred payments and accrued extra interest on top of our “normal” principle and interest debt. Due to the timing of the payment, we only have about $70 left (even though we believe we should have none left by our calculations) and we’ll get that fully squared away in July.
One thing that has changed since last month in our short-term liabilities tracking. Until this month, I had only tracked balances that were left on the credit cards, which consisted only of our 0% balance on our Lowe’s card. Since we paid our other credit cards off monthly, I didn’t include them in the calculation. I realized that this was an error since it’s still a liability, just one that will be paid off shortly. I went back and added my end-of-month credit card balance to my old data, which revised my net worth down for each month by varying amounts. While I announced last month that my net worth exceeded $72,000, this was in error and has been corrected.
Even with our elevated credit card balance, we were still able to reduce our total liabilities by 0.39% in June. Removing over a half-percent of long-term liabilities in one month is definitely a great improvement.
Net Worth
After correcting my old data and adding my credit card balance, our net worth has been revised down to $71,759.93. That reflects a month-to-month growth of 0.30%. That just goes to show that you can still grow your assets even in a down market, it just takes a little extra work and sacrifice.
We’re getting ever closer to freedom from our debts and it feels good to know that our hard work is paying off!
July 2nd, 2008 at 10:04 am
Congrats, you are one of the few who’s networth actually went up (even though it was mostly due to a past month revision). I’ll be posting my update soon, but suffice to say I suffered much more in my portfolio! Back to 2007 levels. Hopefully this month should be good.