Today is a big, busy day for me. It’s April Fool’s Day, obviously, which always leaves me fairly busy. I’m a big prankster on any normal day, so people are generally very leery of me on April 1st. But I promise: no April Fool’s Jokes in this post – just straight talk about my net worth changes in March.
Also, April is Financial Literacy Month! It probably seems like every month is Financial Literacy Month here at Poorer Than You, but I’ll be doing a few very special things to celebrate this April. Be on the lookout for cool stuff here on the site (as always, the best way to keep up with site updates is by subscribing, either through RSS or email).
On to my favorite day of the month… net worth update day!
Change: $177 or 0.46 %
Yay, another “up” month! That’s three months in a row… nearly four in a row, since December was only down by $6. Cross your fingers, folks – I think we truly are making it through the “valley,” and my net worth will generally climb upward from here on out. Which isn’t to say there will never be a down month again, just that there’s a general trend emerging (finally).
Income: School’s over and thus so is my on-campus job, forever. But March was actually rather good for me, income-wise. Poorer Than You does make some money, and it did really well in March. I’m not sure if March was a temporary boost, or if this is something I can sustain for a while, but I’m obviously hoping for the latter. (If for some reason you want to help, the best thing you can do is recommend PTY to a friend you think would like it.)
Spending: Kept it pretty low-key this month, although I did have a guilt-attack that lead to me buying something like $25 worth of junk food at the grocery store. Perhaps not smart, but now I have a junk food stockpile to hold me over for the foreseeable future. Which, considering the rate I go through Little Debby snacks and Oreos, means until about next Tuesday. Nothing makes me miss the incredibly overpriced meal plan from college like having to pay real money for fake nutrients.
Student Loans: Didn’t pay off my student loan interest in March. For whatever reason, my loans haven’t come out of “in school deferment” yet. I blame my college’s wacky “quarter system” (in place of a traditional semester system). I’m monitoring the account for changes, and holding off on making any payments until I get emails about “exit interviews.”
Lending Club: The balance of my Lending Club account is now included in my net worth, under “other” in assets. I considered all sorts of ideas on how to value the balance, including Net Present Value calculations that left me staring at my financial calculator’s instruction manual for far too long. I decided “bah!” to that and just put it down as the principal of the loans plus what’s sitting in my account from payments. I’m not even including accrued interest, because it hasn’t really “accrued” until I get paid. Easy-peasy.
Although the job search continues, March was a fairly fine month, if I do say so myself. On to April!
For a look at my assets and liabilities, check out my NetworthIQ for March. For an explanation of the categories I use, check out the bottom of my entry about February 2008βs net worth balance.
I really like the idea of tracking your net worth, I think I’m going to sign up and track my financial health this way.
Obviously you are partial to networthiq, any tips on starting out with it?
@Ibrahim:
Stephanie’s Off-The-Top-Of-Her-Head NetworthIQ Tips:
1. Think carefully about how you want to categorize your assets and liabilities. NetworthIQ helps a bit with this, by telling you what it means by different categories, but sometimes you have to make your own decisions. Like one time I owed money directly to my school, in addition to my student loan debt. Is that a part of student loans, or is that an “other liability?” Only you can decide, but it’s best to decide from the beginning.
2. In the same vein, think carefully about how you’re going to value things, and whether you’re going to include them at all. There’s a “personal property” category – I could value all of my clothes, computers, and furniture and track it in there… but frankly, that would be a pain, and who cares anyway? For bigger things, like cars or property, what metric will you use to value them? Will you depreciate your car’s value? By what method? These are some things I didn’t think about… and then later realized my car was, in fact, depreciating. And I had to play catch-up later, because I don’t like to go back and change numbers months later (it would mess up my blog entries!).
3. Decide public/private very carefully. I’m in a position where having that information public is advantageous to me – most people are not in that position. Once information gets out of the bottle on the internet, it can never truly be put back in.
4. Have fun with it! π I’m a data head, so doing it on the same day each month and tracking things carefully and getting accurate numbers is important (and sadly, fun) for me. But it’s nothing worth going nuts over. A lot of people are seeing (or have seen recently) big drops – that’s life, don’t let it get you down.
5. A good friend of mine signed up for Mint because it would make putting his numbers into NetworthIQ easier. He just logs into Mint once a month and copies the numbers over. Not a bad plan! I do something very similar, but using the MyPortfolio feature that I get with my Bank of America accounts. Same concept.
6. Don’t get too hung up on comparing yourself to other people’s net worths on the site. It’s a nice feature, but then you remember that signing up is free, and the info is self-entered: in other words, a lot of people log on and make stuff up. “Look, I’m a billionaire! This chart says so!” That makes the comparisons virtually useless.
I’ve been wanting to use NetWorthIQ for a while now and just put in my info for the first time in the last view days!
Thanks for the update on your personal journey. These updates are one of my favorite parts of personal finance sites.
Keep up the progress! We are rooting for ya!
It looks like you have hit the bottom and are really on the way up now. Good job!
@Ibrahim: Many PF bloggers use NetWorthIQ and I jumped on the bandwagon as well. I wrote an in depth post about it here: http://narrowbridgeadventures.blogspot.com/2008/10/my-net-worth-whats-deal.html
Thanks for the tips Stephanie. They will definitely be useful when I start making these decisions.