Poorer Than You

Money: It's Not Just For Rich People

Spreadsheet Tools I’m Using to Achieve Financial Independence

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When I was laid off from my dream job over 8 years ago, I committed myself to the fast track to financial independence. I had a rough go of it for a while, trying one job and then another that turned out to both be very bad fits. I’m lucky—some former coworkers had scooped me up to freelance for them, and that turned into a new dream job. One thing that my two dream jobs have in common? Lots and lots of spreadsheets!

Obviously, I love spreadsheets. Interestingly enough, when I started this blog, I had barely ever used them before. To start getting a hold on my finances, I cobbled together my earliest spreadsheets with no prior spreadsheet knowledge. I had to Google “how to add and subtract in a spreadsheet” for my first one: an expense tracker.

I no longer use that very first expense tracker spreadsheet. But I do still use the next one I made after that, and a few other spreadsheets on my journey to achieve financial independence. Read on to find out how I track my expenses automagically in a spreadsheet now!

Tracking Expenses in Google Sheets with Tiller

For that very first spreadsheet I ever made, I was simply writing down every single penny I spent and using Microsoft Excel to add it all up for the month (my first SUM function!). Now I still track all the money I spend in a spreadsheet, but I don’t key it in manually. Instead I get a daily email of my new transactions automatically sent to me each morning.

The secret is Tiller Money. Tiller links securely to my accounts to download balances and transaction data for me, and drops it right into a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Before Tiller, I used other services that tracked my transactions (like Mint and Personal Capital) but none of them put the information straight into a spreadsheet for me like Tiller does. I was spending hours a month moving information from Mint into my net worth spreadsheet (more on that below). Tiller immediately started saving me time every month.

Transactions in a spreadsheet
NOT my transactions… just an example I pulled from Tiller’s website

Getting the transaction information into a spreadsheet rather than trapped inside a proprietary website gives me unlimited possibilities for what I can do with the data, without having to download a thing. And, it ensures that my data is always mine to access. A few years ago someone asked how much I spent on restaurants per year. I thought, “Hey, I started using Mint back in 2009! I can just look up years of spending!” But nope, I couldn’t – Mint had deleted my earliest transaction data and didn’t even keep the category level information. So I have no idea how much I spent at restaurants in my 20s – that information is just gone now. But Tiller downloads directly into spreadsheets that I control.

Now with this expense data, I can run any analysis I want on what my family is spending. Which is really helpful in terms of understanding what our expenses will be like when we hit financial independence and eventually retire. It also helps in the here and now, to know how much I have available to save, and to keep an eye on all of my accounts for any strange activity (again, that daily email of transactions comes in handy!).

Savings Snowball

A lot of people credit “pay yourself first” as the tactic to fast track them to financial independence. I think that’s great, if you have a really steady income and you can predict ahead of time how much you’ll have to save, and can put it aside before other bills. But me? I’ve had a variable income for most of my adult life. But I figured out a way to make “pay yourself first” work even if I don’t have steady, predictable income:

I pay myself first and last. With a “Savings Snowball.”

If you’re familiar with the concept of a “debt snowball” or a “debt avalanche,” my savings snowball works in a similar way, except everything on this list is a savings goal rather than a debt. For each savings goal on my list, I set a “minimum payment” that I contribute each month. In my earlier, broke-r days, this minimum contribution was sometimes as low as $5/month (my retirement savings started out as that!). With these minimum contributions to each goal every month, I’m paying myself first.

But just saving the minimum? Not likely to get me to financial independence (or any of my other goals) any faster. So I also pay myself last by throwing all the extra money I have leftover at the end of the month at the top goal on the snowball list. Once I hit that goal amount, I “snowball” its minimum contribution and all of the extra leftover money each month into the goal that was #2 on the list.

Also included at the bottom of my snowball are various funds that don’t need the whole kit and caboodle thrown at them (thus their place at the bottom of the snowball, while goals that could use “all I’ve got” thrown at them will always be slotted in above). These include any “Occasionals”: fixed expenses that come up regularly but not monthly (such as my car insurance, which I pay every six months), and any sinking funds for expected future expenses of variable amounts (such as a fund for car maintenance). Why include these in the snowball? Laziness/efficiency. I just put money into everything all at once, it’s easier (and faster) that way.

To keep track of all this, I have two spreadsheet tabs – one for my overall “budget” that includes the minimum payment amounts for the snowball. Each year, I increase the minimum contributions in this sheet by a few percent to account for inflation. For “Occasionals” I increase the contribution as the expenses increase (like when I get a notice of my new premium rates for my car insurance).

Savings Snowball Spreadsheet Screenshot with text overlaid that shows the movement of money (also described in the text below the image)

Inside my main Tiller spreadsheet is my tab for my Savings Snowball. It tabulates up all of my total snowball savings and how much of it I’ve allocated to the different goals in the Snowball already. Each month, I go through and add in the minimum contribution for each goal. And then when Tiller says I’ve got some extra sitting in savings that hasn’t been allocated to a goal yet, I add it on to the #1 goal at the top of the Snowball, paying myself first and last.

Coast to Financial Independence Spreadsheet (Coast FI)

With the expense totals that I got from my Tiller transactions, I can do some fun “actual” financial independence spreadsheets. I say “actual” because any spreadsheet that helps me improve my net worth is technically one of my financial independence spreadsheets, but hey, only some of them have “FI” in the name!

Coast FI is one of those “actual” financial independence spreadsheets – it’s the way I calculate how close I am to fully funding financial independence early. What does it mean to fully fund it early? It means, when I have the amount invested that’s projected to grow to be enough to retire on when I’m 65, then I’m at “Coast FI” – I could just let those investments “coast” until age 65 and they would be enough.

Coast FI - Coast to Financial Independence Spreadsheet

Right now, my spreadsheet says that I’ve got a little ways to go before I hit Coast FI. But I used my transaction data to break down my expenses into categories, and I’m actually at “Coast FI minus housing costs.” Which means, right now all the other aspects of my family’s retirement are saved for – I just gotta keep adding for housing costs (or figure out how to bring future housing costs down, like paying off a mortgage). This is fun to know as a milestone on the way to Coast FI, but can also inform my decisions on how I’m getting to FI, such as whether to buy a house—something I’m currently evaluating.

I have a version of my Coast FI spreadsheet publicly available for you in Google Sheets – you can use your current expenses or do what I’ve done and calculate out what you think your expenses will be once you hit FI. For example, my FI expenses include increased health insurance and health care costs, but leave out life insurance premiums, as our term life insurance policies are set to expire around the time we hit FI.

Net Worth

My net worth number is not my FI number. Our net worth includes some assets that are for the near term (like savings for travel, and our cars), and some debts that will be paid off before before we get to FI. But it’s been so helpful along my journey to track my net worth—from my humblest beginnings to reaching $100,000 in savings to where I am now. My net worth is one constant number that I check each month to see where I’m at.

December 2019 Net Worth Chart | Poorer Than You
I used to make pretty graphs of my net worth, too

My Tiller spreadsheet automatically calculates our overall net worth for me, in a tab called “Balances” that comes with the Tiller spreadsheet by default.

Because I’m extra, I also separate out my personal net worth from my husband’s and the kids’ college funds. For my personal net worth, I uploaded the spreadsheet that I’ve been using for 15 years as another tab in the Tiller spreadsheet. Then I plugged all of my account balances from Tiller into the formulas, and voilà: Tiller automatically calculates my personal net worth as well. Again, this saves me hours per month versus when I used to copy and paste the balances from Mint.

Four Financial Independence Spreadsheets in Two!

These are all the spreadsheets I currently use for my journey to financial independence. Keen observers will note that several of the “spreadsheets” I mentioned above are actually just tabs in my Tiller spreadsheet!

Most of the time, I’m just working within my Tiller spreadsheet. Then I have my Coast FI one when I want to check in with where we are with regards to coasting. I’m a busy woman and there’s no need for me to overwhelm myself with too many spreadsheets—no matter how much I love them!

You can absolutely make and use free spreadsheets to get yourself to financial independence! But if you can afford it and want to save hours of time, Tiller really does make it a lot easier to get all of your information in one place. And Tiller is offering a 30-day free trial so you can see how much time and effort it will really save you before you commit.

The Real Secret to My Success

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The Real Secret to My Success - Stephonee on a child's tricycle

It’s April 1st, 2020… and it’s time to come clean.

Ordinarily, I’d be releasing another net worth update around this time. But last month, I released my final one. In it, I recapped 13 years of net worth updates, and the changes I’ve been through in that time. I also wrote a retrospective last year about getting to my first $100,000 in savings.

Lies, dirty lies of omission, abounds in both of them. And throughout this whole blog.

Now, of course, on any blog there will be things left out. I’m not expected to narrate every single pack of gum or straw bale that I buy, nor every coin that lands in my pocket. In fact, I’ve kept mum about my precise income for most of the blog, and that’s perfectly okay. There’s no obligation to share any of this with the internet, and it’s a fairy tale to believe that any blogger is sharing 100% of everything.

But still… there’s a part of the tale that I’ve very intentionally left out, and today’s the day to stop spinning. And, not only do I have to ask your forgiveness, but I also need your help.

Where It All Began

13 years ago, I had started this blog and it started to get some traction. A mention on the front page of the New York Times calling me a “debt blogger” and a few other high-profile internet hits put a lot of eyeballs on this site. Some people were kind and helpful, others offered to show me where my bootstraps were and advice on how hard to pull them, but one person reached out and offered something else:

Gold. Literal gold.

I ignored the offer at first. A scam (or just more spam) I thought; it definitely didn’t seem real. But the person making the offer was persistent, but not pushy. He saw me getting in over my head with debt and a bad employment situation, and my school hounding me for money I didn’t have for rent on an apartment I wasn’t even living in anymore (since I had dropped out).

So I took the gold.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and I promise you – this was not a Sugar Daddy/Baby situation. He genuinely seemed to want to help out, and I was helping my mom get ready to move out and downsize by selling her furniture on Craigslist at the time. So, he bought it all, paid way above market value (in gold) for a well-loved kitchen table and some dressers, and I just had to figure out how to sell physical gold (cause the bursar’s office at school was like “Yeah, no, we don’t take that – check or Visa/Mastercard only.”)

Over the Years

Each time I would get in a bind, he would show up. It was like he had a sixth sense for when I was in financial trouble. He’d pop up, before I’d even written anything on the blog or told anyone. We became somewhat of friends even, because he would also show up to celebrate my successes. Family birthday parties, my college graduation, even when my then-fiance and I were taking our own engagement pictures in a park for fun – he showed up with gold and offered to pay for real engagement photos.

You are probably all “okay, fine, lots of people get gifts, Stephonee… this isn’t a big secret,” but I assure you, this is much bigger and weirder than regular gifts.

For one thing, the amounts grew to be substantial. When I was laid off from my dream job (while also trying to plan my wedding) in 2014, he showed up with so much gold, I had to rent a large storage unit to hold it while figuring out how to unload all that. It was like Fort Knox.

The other thing that makes this so very, very weird (and why I couldn’t ever tell you before) is that I have no clue what his name is. He just… never told me. And after years of knowing him, I wasn’t about to ask and be super awkward about it.

What’s In a Name?

Okay, so why even bother coming clean now… it’s been years since I last took this guy’s gold, and does it even really matter? I wouldn’t have said anything, except he popped back into my life again recently, only this time, not bearing a gift. Instead, he’s demanding that I haven’t held up my end of some “agreement” relating to that last roomful of gold.

Now, I’ll tell you right now, I have no idea what he’s talking about. I thought it was a wedding gift. And if there was any agreement, it was verbal and this guy’s got nothing in writing. But the mere fact that he’s demanding something from me now, years later, tells me that this was a long con. And based on his ability to make gold appear out of seemingly nowhere, I’m guessing he’s been at this a long time. (The “no name” thing makes soooo much more sense in light of this, too.)

So I figure, rather than giving into his truly ridiculous demand, I’m just going to expose him.

The following are photos I have of him showing up at life events of mine. You might recognize these photos from my $100,000 savings recap – I hired a digital artist to edit him out of them for that blog post, because it’s so hard to find photos from that time where he’s not there. But I’m releasing these original photos now, in the hopes that someone recognizes him and can help me figure out his name.

Does anybody recognize this guy? He’s pretty weird-looking, so I figure someone has to know him.

Here’s the last piece of the puzzle that might help: he’s demanding that what I agreed to give him in return for the final pile of gold was my first born child.

Obviously, I didn’t agree to that, and I’m not going to do it. INCONCEIVABLE. I only mention it because with such a long con, I imagine this is his MO (modus operandi): spinning out gold for poor girls in need of help, then showing up later in our lives to extort us.

If you know this guy’s name, please shout it out in the comments. I believe through the power of crowdsourcing, we can put an end to his tomfoolery.

APRIL FOOLS! Thanks, as always, to those who played along without revealing the joke! This year’s Amazon gift card goes to Sam, for not only being first, but being… well… Samwise about it. See his comment below!

And most importantly, thanks and credit to Sierra Tuazon for the artwork on this post. She was a dream to work with and is available for additional freelance work right now – HIRE HER!

FINAL Net Worth Update: December 2019

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[Editor’s Note: It’s weird to put an editor’s note on my own blog post, but this one needs it. This post was written mostly over the course of January and February 2020, before the COVID-19 virus caused major economic upheaval. I’m getting around to finishing and publishing it right smack dab in the middle of a pandemic, but it’s important that as you read it, you realize that except for this note and the epilogue at the bottom, what you are reading was written before the pandemic and stock market crash that’s happening with it.]

And so, we have reached the end of an era. It’s been 13 years since my very first net worth post in December of 2006. It’s no surprise that a lot has changed since then. That was always the idea: that I would turn things around from the fairly-crappy situation at the time (crappy enough to name my blog “Poorer Than You,” anyway) and grow to a place of ULTIMATE RICHES! Now, whether the point I’m at now is “ultimate riches” by anyone’s standard, including me-of-2006, is ripe for debate, but let’s not dwell too much on that and dig right into the numbers… for the last time!

Change: +$6,500 | +4.95%

December 2019 Net Worth TOTAL: $137,900

versus December 2007 Net Worth (-$29,365): +$167,265 in 13 years

versus September 2009 Net Worth (my lowest point, -$38,901): +$176,801 in 10.25 years

That’s $17,248.88 per year since the low point.

December 2019 Net Worth Chart | Poorer Than You Net Worth by Categories, December 2019 | Poorer Than You

If you’re new to my net worth updates, well, I think the end is a weird place to start, but hey, some people like to work backwards! Here’s what you need to know (returning readers may choose to skip on down to the new stuff by clicking here):

Net worth is assets (what I own, on the left of the green chart) minus liabilities (what I owe, on the right of the green chart).

The net worth is for me alone, though I am married. My husband and I maintain “separate but combined” finances, especially for the purposes of what’s shared on the internets. What you see here are the totals of all of the accounts that are in my name only, plus one half of joint accounts. This does occasionally cause some wonkiness in the numbers, but I will always call that out and explain it (look for me talking about “the marriage bonus” or “the marriage penalty” from time to time). Also, it tends to even out in terms of helping my net worth about half the time, and hurting the other half.

If you’re interested in looking at my past numbers (working backwards from here!), there’s a handy “Time Travel” navigation section at the bottom!

Now, let’s do this thing, for the first time, for the last time (I’m just quoting Spaceballs; it’s really the last time):

Cash: +$2,274 since last month

The cash hoarding continues, and concludes! Yes, this month, we finally piled up enough cash to pay off the entirety of the estate plan bill, and the dental work. Done, finito!

In fact, the other day it occurred to me that I’d moved our “Savings Snowball” into our Tiller spreadsheet, but I hadn’t connected the savings goals in the snowball to the automatically-updating credit card balances in that spreadsheet. In other words, I was still supposed to be manually reducing the goals for the estate plan bill credit card and the dental work credit cards each month as we paid the minimum payments… but I was months behind in updating those! As soon as I hooked up the balances appropriately in my Tiller spreadsheet, I realized we had like $2,000 extra dollars in there.

Oops?

So the great news is that we had that extra $2,000 to put toward the next thing in the snowball, which is our 2019 IRAs (retirement accounts), which have been sadly neglected since we got our braces in May. Between the extra cash from working mad overtime last month (hurray holiday season!) and the found $2,000, we were able to put $3,234.56 into our IRAs the other day. Sadly, this won’t show up in the “retirement” category below because it happened in January, not December. But I thought you all would like to know that the ultimate fate of this cash hoarding is… retirement! As it usually is with me, heh!

Bigger Picture Cash: +$19,643 since December 2006

Well that’s, um, a lot. Too much, to be honest. Sure, I had only $232 cash at the start of the blog (and the net worth tracking), so there was really nowhere to go but up! But those of you who have been reading along for a while know that I’m actually rather uncomfortable with cash and I don’t like having my money in it.

The first $6,000 of this doesn’t bother me because it’s in FDIC-insured accounts earning 5% interest, so it’s winning the fight against inflation (and inflation is what makes me hate cash). That’s fine. And another $4,000ish is the “cost of doing business” in Northern Virginia (in other words, the amount to keep me one month ahead on all of the family bills in checking).

But the rest? It’s those darned savings goals! And I just hate having them in cash. It’s really the best place for them right now, and I could do better on finding new creative ways to put that cash to work (like more savings account opening bonuses), but I still just hate it. Do. Not. Like.

Retirement: +$4,026 since last month

Like I said above, this does not include the $3,234.56 contribution to retirement accounts that happened in January, because this is December only. (Also, $2,000 of that went to my husband’s IRA, so it would have been a “marriage penalty” situation, as only $1,234.56 went to my IRA this month.) No, instead, this is the normal ~$500 HSA contributions and then allllll the rest is market growth. Again.

Bigger Picture Retirement: $134,824 since December 2006

At the start, there was nothing. Actually, there was $26 which was counted in the “Stocks” category rather than “Retirement”: a single share of Kodak stock that I had been holding for the seven years prior, since my grandmother gifted it to me for my 13th birthday. It paid a $0.25 dividend every quarter back then (a quarter per quarter!), so you could say that I used to be a badass dividend investor, and I bet most of you had no idea! Hahahaha… anyway…

I’m extremely proud of the retirement money that I’ve been able to pack away. I didn’t get started investing that money until March 2010, more than a year after my last college final (and also one year into the stock market recovery after the Great Recession). Since that initial $3,000 investment, my growth has compounded, but for much of that time, it was just the fact that I was consistently investing and putting the money in.

I’ve clearly benefited greatly from this long recovery so far, but it’s important to remember that the growth numbers aren’t the whole story. Another recession could come along at any time, and though it would knock some money off this dollar amount (maybe a large amount of money), it won’t change the number of shares of index funds I own. Those shares are mine, I bought them, and I will hold them (and buy more of them) even if their value drops for a time.

Cars: -$10 since last month

Let’s just swing straight into talking about how this compares to 13 years ago, because as usual I have almost nothing to say about this from month to month!

Big Picture Cars: +$755 since December 2006

There are a lot of “secrets” to my success (if you call writing about it all very publicly “secrets”), but certainly one of them is that I’m still driving a car worth approximately the same as the one from my college days. Back then, it was a literal granny-mobile purchased directly from my own grandmother.

I have changed cars exactly once since then, when the first car started to stall out if I tried to drive with the air conditioning on (2012). I bought a very sensible, low-maintenance used car to replace it. I only had about $2,400 saved up for a new car, and was able to sell the old car for $1,200, so I got a low-interest auto loan for the difference (about $9,000).

There are those in the personal finance blogosphere (are we still calling it that 13 years later? whatever) who would scold me (or already have) because the car was more than 10% of my salary at the time (the horror that I didn’t get a $4,500 car!), or that because I spent more than $5,000 and got a loan that I “don’t know the difference between wants and needs.” To that: pssh, whatever. That’s just like, your opinion, man.

But also, I made a cold, calculating decision about the long term financial ramifications of buying a “clunker” for less than $5,000 versus buying something more reliable and low maintenance. Over the long term, spending a bit more (even some of it on interest, heaven forbid) saves me money as the car I got (a boring, reliable, awesome Toyota Camry) has had no costly maintenance over the past 8 years, runs like clockwork, and has saved me from having to go through the painful, expensive, time-consuming process of car-buying all over again. I also was careful to keep the monthly payments affordable, since this wasn’t my first time figuring out how much is appropriate to spend on a car.

And because of that, my current car is worth more now (at 16 years old, 8 years into my owning it) than my old car was at the time of the first net worth update (at 11 years old, a mere few months into my owning it). More on the car when we get to the “Car Loan” section of the Debts, below.

Other Assets: No change since last month

Big Picture Other Assets: -$182 since December 2006

Apparently, 13 years ago, someone owed me $200. I don’t know who. They paid it though, according to my later blog posts.

Now, no one owes me money, except Lending Club borrowers, who still have 18 of my dollars. Which means I’ll get another tax form a year from now that’s about 80-bajillion pages long. Lending Club is like the Hotel California: you can stop investing in new loans, and withdraw your money slowly, but you can never actually leave.

Home Mortgage: No change since last month

Big Picture Home Mortgage: No change since December 2006

I’m not going to address all of the categories where there was nothing in 2006 and nothing now, but this one felt like I should at least mention it. I get a lot of flack sometimes for not having bought a house by now (I’m 33, married, with a kid, wHy dOn’T i oWn a hOmE?!?!!).

As time goes on, I’m even more convinced of two really good reasons why I don’t own my home:

1) I just don’t want to. And as much as I don’t want to, my husband wants to even less. Neither of us in interested in getting to knock down walls or choose their paint colors, picking appliances, or being in charge of the maintenance in our home. A lot of people like that stuff, but we do not.

2) The progress I’ve made in every other area of my net worth has not been slowed by attempting to save up a cash down payment for a home, or paying maintenance costs on a home. The progress I’ve made has been a direct result of focusing on areas that have been important to me, rather than focusing on home ownership.

I’m not saying that renting is always a road to riches… but intentionally renting a reasonably-priced place that suits my needs and focusing deeply on investing and saving for other things has worked really well so far.

Student Loans: -$77 since last month

Big Picture Student Loans: -$16,170 since December 2006 (-$31,854 since November 2008, when I took out my final student loan)

Not much to say on the month-to-month (made my minimum payment again!). And even on the big picture, I haven’t really done much to aggressively tackle my loans.

A few times I refinanced parts of my loans to 0% interest credit cards, which did speed things along a bit. And once about a year ago, I drank some wine and then decided to pay off a dangling sub-$1000 balance on my second-to-last student loan. But besides that, I’ve just paid the minimum payments on my student loans.

The vast majority of my student loan debt ($36,167.20 of the original $43,667.20 balance) has been on a 25-year repayment plan. It’s looking like I’ll have them paid off by the end of the 13th year, if not the 12th (a year from now). Which is sort of amazing since, again, I really haven’t done that much to get rid of them. The 0% interest credit card refinancing really did the heavy lifting here.

Declaring that my student loans could be paid off within the year may seem like a bold statement, and it’s not one I would have made a year ago. But after successfully pulling more than $12,000 out of seemingly nowhere to pay for dental work this past year, my remaining student loan balance of $11,813 just seems so… doable. Who knows if it will really happen (I still prefer to focus on maxing out tax-advantaged accounts like my Health Savings Account and retirement accounts, first), but it could be done.

Credit Card Debt: -$170 since last month

Big Picture Credit Card Debt: +$6,251 since December 2006

Boy howdy do I have a lot more credit card debt than I used to! And in 2006, that credit card debt weighed heavy on my shoulders, in no small part because the balance I owed was just $200 short of the total amount that I had earned in 2006. And I felt some shame about the balance, because while it had started out as an intentional strategy to cover required class costs while in film school, it had spiraled out of control as I attempted to live a somewhat “normal” college life despite not having any money (negative money, really).

I had chatted with a college professor of mine that I really looked up to (by the name of Jack), while I was waiting for my advisor to show up to sign my paperwork when I temporarily dropped out. Jack was sympathetic to my reasons for dropping out, but dismissive about my credit card debt because it was less than $2,000. “That’s nothing,” he said; but really, it wasn’t “nothing.” (Sorry Jack, I still love ya, but you were wrong about this one.) For one thing, my on-campus job was paying just 10 cents per hour more than the minimum wage, so I was only making $6.85 per hour at the time, before taxes. That’s 259 hours of work, assuming I didn’t have to pay any taxes (I did) and that I could put all of my earnings toward the debt (I couldn’t, it was a work study job and I had a shortfall between my financial aid and the cost of school, hence the credit card in the first place).

After dropping out, despite almost doubling my income, it still took me another 19 months of concerted effort to pay off the credit card debt (which was mostly acquired in a 5 month period in the first place). I just wasn’t making very much money, and I had other debts to pay, too (we’ll talk about those below).

But today’s credit card debt? I hardly think about it. The biggest reason for that, by far, is that it’s at 0% interest and it always has been. And, I’ve saved up the cash to pay it all off at any time. Rather than two years of scraping to try and pay off the balance on an unintentional debt, I now have a very intentional debt that I leveraged, and saved for while acquiring. This debt is all of my dental work from over the past year, and half the cost of an estate plan. Since this post is taking me two months to write, I can actually provide a small update here: I’ve since put the other half of the estate plan onto the credit card… and also saved up the last dollar needed to pay it all off in full before the 0% promos end.

It’s sort of amazing how much faster I can do all this now. And yes, a <$2,000 credit card balance does look like “nothing” from here. But it wasn’t. What’s a breeze now was an ocean over my head, drowning me back then.

Car Loan: No change since last month

Big Picture Car Loan: -$1,900 since December 2006 (my first car), -$8,934 since June 2012 (my current car)

Two car loans paid off since 2006!

The first one was a 0% interest loan from my grandmother (the car was hers) that I diligently paid $100/month toward for 10 months, until she forgave the balance as a super-generous birthday present to me (she was also getting older, having just turned 90, and didn’t want to deal with the monthly checks). I kept the car for another four and a half years after she forgave the loan balance, before it gave out.

When I paid off my credit card debt, I started saving for the next car. But because I had so many different things to save for, I was really only able to save $10/month toward the next car. So when it came time to replace my mostly-dead car, I just didn’t have very much saved up, though I had at some point raised the amount I was contributing, even making it my main goal for a while and throwing all I had at it.

I 0% regret getting that loan. I took the full four years to pay it off (okay, I paid it off one month early), and focused on so many other things instead of paying extra on a *checks notes* 1.99% interest loan. I contributed to retirement accounts (naturally), went to Ireland with my Irish-af mother, pulled together a budget wedding despite being laid off in the middle of planning, went to Disney World for the first time ever for our honeymoon, traveled for friends’ weddings, bought a $3,148 couch, jumped ship from jobs that were giving me anxiety to take my lightning-strikes-twice-dream-job from side hustle to full time, planned a second Disney World trip with my extended family, and got pregnant. Seriously, all of that in the time I slowly paid off the car loan, and not one regret about putting all of those things ahead of paying down a low-interest $9,000 loan ahead of schedule.

Will there be another car loan in my future? Maybe yes, maybe no. Since paying off the last car loan, I’ve been saving up to buy an equivalently-priced (plus inflation) new-to-me car every 10 years. So it’s really a matter of whether I need to replace my car sooner than every 10 years, or if when it comes time to replace, my needs exceed that budget (or if both things happen). I just keep plugging away at the “new car” savings every month. Even if it isn’t enough to buy me the car I need completely in cash, it will get me pretty far toward what I need when I need it.

Other Debts: +$37 since last month

Big Picture Other Debts: -$432 since December 2006

What has been considered “other debts” has varied wildly over the years, which I guess is to be expected from such a miscellaneous category.

In 2006, this was the $600 that my college was hounding me for (literal “we’re gonna ruin your credit if you don’t pay up” phone calls), because they wanted me to pay for 2/3rds of my housing for the term I dropped out of 1 week in. I was making literally nothing at the time, which I tried to explain to them, so they told me to pay what I could (not sure how they thought that was going to work?). One thing my school was always good at: thinking that somehow I would make money appear, that maybe my parents were hiding money somewhere that I would use. I paid that off mostly by selling my mom’s furniture on Craigslist (with her permission, of course).

I’ve used this category to track any money I owed to individuals, and eventually started tracking my tax liability in it monthly, rather than letting the yearly or quarterly estimated taxes take a bite out of my net worth all at once. Nowadays, the latter is all that it is: the sum of what I owe in taxes for the blog/business that hasn’t already been paid, plus monthly chunks of things like hosting fees, my PO box, and any other yearly business expenses.

Belated Reflections in the Time of COVID-19

98% of the above was written in January and February of 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic became the epicenter of everything. It’s really hard to put myself back into a December/January/February mindset in order to write a conclusion here, so I honestly am not even going to try. Instead, I’m going to embrace the fact that this has taken me so long to write, and just let it be an amusing time capsule, since that’s what it would have been if I had actually published it closer to “on time.”

It also means that I’m going to skip talking about the milestones that I was approaching before… because that’s just depressing. Let’s not talk about those.

Still, the question remains: will this truly be the last net worth update? In the last update, I went through my reasons for considering ending the net worth updates, and those are all still valid. Even if my net worth has taken a considerable hit since December (and oh, it has), the fact remains that it’s still higher than anyone who can claim to be “Poorer Than You.” And I am still planning to take the site in a different direction, after I hit “publish” on this post.

But… I may be convinced to do another update in the midst of COVID-19. Or at least, talk about the investment portion of it. I do like the freeing aspect of not being tied to it being a “net worth update” specifically – I can approach it any other way I like. Any other way that makes sense. And there’s a power in that, which is important, because like so many other people, I’m feeling quite powerless these days. Even with my little pile of gold here that I’ve stacked up.

This is it (probably) – the final one. Hope you’ve had fun following along. Don’t worry, the blog isn’t going away, and I’m still going to write about money here, and still in very personal ways. Just different personal ways. You’ll see.

I will also continue to track my net worth privately, because it’s always been a useful tool for me. I used to run these numbers by hand in a spreadsheet, but now my balances are imported automagically into the spreadsheet using a tool called Tiller. Try Tiller for free for 30 days and see how automatically-updating financial spreadsheets can save you time and money.

Time Travel

Net Worth Update: November 2019

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This update isn’t coming out until nearly Christmas, and I’m totally okay with that. December is crazy enough for most people, but this is my eleventh consecutive December working in online retail, and I do thrive a bit (or a lot) on the chaos, and have also learned to accept and expect it. I told many people that I could not commit to helping with even relatively small things this month, and said often “To my family, I don’t exist until the evening of Christmas Eve. For everyone else, I don’t exist until after Christmas.”

So really, it’s a Christmas miracle that this is getting posted before Christmas at all. I exist! But only briefly, and only now that my work has passed all shipping cut-offs except “Priority Overnight.” Time for some Glühwein (mulled Christmas wine) and a net worth update! And actually, this may be the penultimate net worth update…

Change: +$4,054 | +3.18%

November Net Worth TOTAL: $131,400

November 2019 Net Worth Chart | Poorer Than You Net Worth by Categories, November 2019 | Poorer Than You

If you’re new to my net worth updates, here’s what you need to know (returning readers may choose to skip on down to the new stuff by clicking here):

Net worth is assets (what I own, on the left of the green chart) minus liabilities (what I owe, on the right of the green chart).

The net worth is for me alone, though I am married. My husband and I maintain “separate but combined” finances, especially for the purposes of what’s shared on the internets. What you see here are the totals of all of the accounts that are in my name only, plus one half of joint accounts. This does occasionally cause some wonkiness in the numbers, but I will always call that out and explain it (look for me talking about “the marriage bonus” or “the marriage penalty” from time to time). Also, it tends to even out in terms of helping my net worth about half the time, and hurting the other half.

If you’re interested in looking at my past numbers, there’s a handy “Time Travel” navigation section at the bottom!

Now, on to what’s happened this month:

Cash: +$699

Not my usual cash-hoarding, but still an increase. We put down a retainer on an estate planning lawyer this month (that sounds so goddamn fancy I can’t even take it), but that didn’t come out of cash – we put it on a 0% interest credit card instead, and we’re working on building up the cash to pay that off starting now. So this increase goes almost exclusively to the fund to pay that off.

Retirement: +$4,914

The stock market had another good month, and nearly all of my retirement money is in total stock market index funds (except for a portion of my HSA equal to our family’s out-of-pocket maximum on our health insurance plan, which I keep in a bond fund). I only made my automatic HSA contributions last month, nothing more was added by me, so this is literally 88% attributed to growth and only 12% my own contributions to retirement (this month).

Car: -$84

Despite its “book value” decline, my car is doing quite well, and we are still a one-car family. We’ve been spending a bit more on Lyft rides lately, because we’re doing more things with our toddler out and about in the world, so the parent going to work rather than carting the toddler around often ends up taking a Lyft maybe once per week or so these days. That’s still very low cost versus getting and maintaining an entire second vehicle, though we’ll have to keep an eye on it.

Other Assets: -$203

I cashed some checks and I have no outstanding checks left to cash, so this is actually a good drop. I’m not sitting around on any checks this month!

Student Loans: -$75

Boring old regular minimum payment. Still not to the point of returning to repaying this faster (that will come after the Estate Plan Payoff Fund is full and we’ve both maxed out IRA contributions for 2019 & 2020).

Other Debts: +$23

An increase in tax & expense liability for the blog as a business. Nothing all that exciting. This may go down quite a bit in December or January when I make a Solo 401(k) contribution (I have until January 31st to make an “employee” contribution according to the rules of my Solo 401(k) provider, E*Trade). I’d like to do the contribution in December, but it may be better to wait until the books are closed on the year and I know the full and total income and expenses and then do it in January.

Milestone Progress

Debt Freedom: I entered the new debt (the retainer for the estate planning lawyer) in Undebt.it, and my debt freedom date went from July 2024 to February 2024. What, wait?!? Why did my debt freedom date move up sooner from entering a new debt?!?

But actually, after closer inspection, it makes sense, weirdly enough. The new debt comes with a new minimum payment ($35/month), which adds to the “snowball” of payments on the other debts once it’s paid off (in October 2020). That little extra $35/month starting in November 2020 will accelerate my debt freedom by five months! The power of saving small amounts is real.

$200,000 in Retirement Accounts: Thank you, stock market! I now need $1538 per month, minus HSA ($583) and IRA ($500) contributions, that’s $455 needed in stock market growth per month over the next 45 months. Barring a recession (which hey, that could happen), I may just hit this milestone early!

Wait a Second…

Stephonee, you say, weren’t you saying something (in the intro that I mostly skimmed past) about this being your LAST net worth update?!?

Actually, what I said was “penultimate,” meaning second-to-last, but yes, I did say that much.

But what? Why?

When I started doing these net worth updates a million years ago, I was (as the title of the blog states) feeling poorer than anyone else. I believed that my net worth would eventually climb, and that I could show the journey along the way. I wanted to show that journey, to keep myself accountable for making it happen, but also to help anyone else feeling like they were at the base of a tall mountain to climb… to have them see someone who was also making that journey, maybe someone who was a little bit ahead saying “hey, this is the path I took to get to this ledge, wanna come up with me?”

But now… I’m rich. $131,400 net worth isn’t enough to make me financially independent, but it is enough to make me rich. According to this New York Times “Are You Rich?” calculator, anyway:

Results from putting my net worth and age bracket into the New York Times' "Are You Rich?" calculator: The net worth you entered is higher than more than 85 percent of families your age group, and also higher than the threshold you set for what constitutes a high net worth. In other words, Yes, you might be rich. Here’s the wealth distribution among households around your age, with your bracket highlighted: Wealth rank among households age 18 to 34

My net worth alone (say nothing of the net worth of my husband, which I don’t publish here, but is a positive number that pushes our household even higher) puts me in the top 15% of households for my age group.

But now that I’m here… it feels like the net worth updates don’t serve their function anymore. To someone just starting at the bottom of the mountain, it looks like I’m way up at a summit that may feel unreachable. (And sitting on top of a dragon’s hoard of gold on top of that.) The early updates still exist, but I do feel like the newer updates aren’t really adding much to the story.

It’s become clear over the last few years that, with the busy life that I lead (and happily so!), I’m only going to get 12-14 blog posts written and posted per year. But when 12 of those are net worth updates, that means 0-2 other blogs posts about anything else per year. And while the net worth updates have helped keep me more consistent, they’ve also created an obligation in my mind that has prevented me from posting other blog posts. For example, I’ve had a post about 401(k)s and IRAs mostly written since early November, but then I felt like I shouldn’t finish it until October’s net worth update was posted. Then I didn’t have time to finish it before December came ’round and it felt like I should get this net worth update posted. And that could go on for a while, and it has with past posts.

I’ve thought a lot over the past year about the direction I want to take with a blog called “Poorer Than You.” Since the very early days of the blog, people have made jokes about how I’d someday have to change the name of the blog to “Richer Than You.” (Apologies to everyone who made that joke this year, someone else beat you to it by 12 years!) But rather than change the name, I’d like to refocus. Rather than keeping it always on my current situation, there is a lot I can talk about (and bring in others to talk about!) that fits the title and helps people who feel like they’re starting from well below zero.

So… I feel like it’s just about time to give up posting the net worth updates. But, I didn’t want to do so suddenly and without warning, because there may be some of you who get a lot out of these, and don’t want me to stop. There may be reasons that I should keep going with them, that I’m not thinking of. So I’m opening the floor (well, the comments below) to hear your thoughts. I may just end up doing what I want in the end, but I’m open to hearing your feedback on this.

So maybe next month will be the final Net Worth Update, capping off 13 years of net worth posts with one final update. We’ll see. I welcome your thoughts!

I used to run these numbers by hand in a spreadsheet, but recently I’ve hooked up my spreadsheet to Tiller and now my balances are imported automagically. It’s saving me hours per month of digging numbers out of various accounts! Try Tiller for free for 30 days and see how automatically-updating financial spreadsheets can save you time and money.

Time Travel

Net Worth Update: October 2019

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This post is laaaaaaate and I have almost no excuses. The good news is that before the end of October, I finally finished switching my net worth spreadsheet over to Tiller, which automatically imports my balances into the spreadsheet directly. Before this, I was hand-copying each balance from either Mint (if I was lucky) or from each bank/financial institution’s website. One. By. One.

So part of my delay in getting this post out was just… making the spreadsheet pretty again once I got it all hooked up. I’m sorry that I wanted to make it pretty for you! Alright, well, let’s get into the numbers before we waste any more time:

Change: +$4,830 | +3.79%

October Net Worth TOTAL: $127,346

October 2019 Net Worth Chart | Poorer Than You Net Worth by Categories, October 2019 | Poorer Than You

If you’re new to my net worth updates, here’s what you need to know (returning readers may choose to skip on down to the new stuff by clicking here):

Net worth is assets (what I own, on the left of the green chart) minus liabilities (what I owe, on the right of the green chart).

The net worth is for me alone, though I am married. My husband and I maintain “separate but combined” finances, especially for the purposes of what’s shared on the internets. What you see here are the totals of all of the accounts that are in my name only, plus one half of joint accounts. (Debts are all in my name because my husband would rather eat his socks than take on debt. Not anymore! The credit card for his dental work is in his name and I’m counting that toward his net worth. But also, the savings to eventually pay the card off is all in his name.) This does occasionally cause some wonkiness in the numbers, but I will always call that out and explain it (look for me talking about “the marriage bonus” or “the marriage penalty” from time to time). Also, it tends to even out in terms of helping my net worth about half the time, and hurting the other half.

If you’re interested in looking at my past numbers, there’s a handy “Time Travel” navigation section at the bottom!

Now, on to what’s happened this month:

Cash: +$1,700

Doing better now that the dental work is all paid for! Not a huge gain this month though, as I took some time off to attend Cents Positive in Seattle, and stayed a few extra days to enjoy the Pacific Northwest (a place I’d never been before!), socialize with friends from Twitter, and to finally do all the numbers for my dental work dashboard. It was time well-spent, but my husband had to also take the time off to watch our toddler, so it did result in some lost wages, and travel expenses as well. The flights were covered by credit card points I had been hoarding, and I split the hotel room with two other ladies, then stayed a few days at Angela‘s house (because she’s the best), but there were still a few meals and incidental expenses, of course.

But now that the dental work is paid for, the cash hoarding may end! Oh wait, nope, now we gotta do our estate plan (finally) to the tune of $2,900. WHOMP WHOMP. Back to the 0% interest credit cards with opening bonuses we go!

Retirement: +$3,140

As usual, this is a dash of my HSA contributions and then a whole heaping pile of market growth. After the estate plan is paid for, we’ll restart contributions to other retirement accounts (I haven’t forgotten about you, 2019 IRA!), but not quite yet.

(I may make a detour and contribute to my Solo 401(k) in December, but that’s something to figure out after the end of November!)

Cars: -$122

The Camry continues to make its slow, inevitable decline into worthlessness. And needs an oil change.

Other Assets: -$155

Lending Club is almost non-existent at this point (slowly been pulling my money out for what feels like forever now, due to lots of defaults on my loans). What I do have in this category is some uncashed checks because both of my Cents Positive roomies paid me with paper checks, which is kinda hilarious for internet friends. I hadn’t unpacked my bags by the end of the month, so these were still uncashed. Good news is I cashed them right after doing these net worth numbers, so I didn’t keep those roomies waiting forever. (Sorry roomies!)

Student Loans: -$151

Two month’s of principal at once! (Because last month, the payment didn’t settle until after the 1st of October, le sigh.) Also, this brought my balance down below $12,000! It feel like “four figures” (sub-$10,000) is within reach now. You know, once we pay for the estate plan and then max out my IRA. And next year’s IRAs. And the Solo 401(k). Le sigh.

Other Debts: +$23

Just another month of hosting/security/PO Box for the business (this blog, mainly).

Milestone Progress

Debt Freedom: I keep up with my debt repayment in Undebt.it, but nothing has changed from last month (still just paying basically the minimum payments) so my debt payoff date is still estimated at July 2024. There’s really no hope of moving that any closer by the end of this year (see above regarding the student loans) but it’s not really bothering me, either.

$200,000 in Retirement Accounts: Good progress this month! I now need $1,611 per month, minus HSA ($583) and IRA ($500) contributions, that’s $528 needed in stock market growth per month over the next 46 months. The goal is to get this to the point where the “growth needed” number is zero so that it’s all just contributions. At this current rate, I’ll hit that “crossover point” in 16.5 months, or the middle of March 2021, and then contributions alone would carry me to my goal. (This is virtually meaningless, but hey, most milestones are! They’re just fun numbers!)

To sum up: I surpassed July’s number, bringing my net worth to a new all-time high. That’s +$166,247 in just 10 years and 1 month since my all-time low in September 2009!

I used to run these numbers by hand in a spreadsheet, but as of this month (!) I’ve hooked up my spreadsheet to Tiller and now my balances are imported automagically. It’s going to save me hours of updating the spreadsheet each month, and I’m already glad I finally made the switch! Try Tiller for free for 30 days and see how automatically-updating financial spreadsheets can save you time and money.

How about you? How is your net worth doing… and how long do you spend updating it?

Time Travel

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