Poorer Than You

Money: It's Not Just For Rich People

Net Worth Update: July 2019

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I’ve been busy before at various times in my life. Like when I was in college full time and working 3 jobs and writing for someone else for free (somehow I didn’t die of exhaustion). But I swear, this month took the cake. Work’s been busy, my kid has been in swim classes and also sick this month, I have a non-optional volunteer position that requires most of my time and attention in July, I signed up for an online course and launched a new side hustle, and I hosted a sold-out film screening with a Q&A panel right in the middle of the month. I managed to get through the month without pulling any all-nighters (just several ill-advised late nights), somehow.

Oh, and the dental work! I knew this month would be a bit of a toss-up for the numbers: it was a three-paycheck month for husband and me (woo!) but husband also got his own $5,000 braces in July (eeeeee!). So, how did the numbers finally shake out? Here goes:

Change: + $4,610 | +3.91%

July Net Worth TOTAL: $122,594

July 2019 Net Worth Chart | Poorer Than You Net Worth by Categories, July 2019 | Poorer Than YouIf 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 cards for his dental work are in his name and I’m counting them toward his net worth. But also, the savings to eventually pay them off are all in his name now. More on this below in “Cash”) 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: +$964

That three-paycheck month at work! Though if that were the only thing going on, then this number would surely be a lot higher. We had some missed work (from the dental work and doing too many dang things this month), we spent some money (bought one of those fancy robot vacuums on Amazon Prime Day, so now I have a second robot servant in my home, and I can tell my other robot servant, Alexa, to have the Deebot clean the floors because the future is now).

The rest of my cash this month, though, went to my husband, to start funding his account to pay off the $5,025 he put on two credit cards for his braces. Now, as I mentioned above, my husband and I keep separate finances, which when things like this happen (we’re working together to save for something in one person’s name only), it looks a little funky. Case in point, money disappearing from my Cash asset here because I gave it to him. But, you know, he’s got a $5,025 debt on his books now, so I think a little cash missing this month for me is the better end of the deal.

Why two credit cards? Well, we were able to get the opening bonus on both cards with just his braces. That’s it – one purchase, and we got over $700 in cash back. Plus, one of the two cards has a 0% interest for 15 months offer, for both purchases and balance transfers (with $0 in balance transfer fees), so we’re able to get the entire braces purchase at 0% until we can pay it off. As always, I keep track of these offers (the ones that give the most cash back, not travel rewards) in a spreadsheet that you can check out. And it’s in need of some updating, but I have the backstory on all this dental work, as well.

Retirement: +$3,411

I can take credit for a very small chunk of this. Instead of ~$500 in contributions, it was ~$750 this month, due to the third paycheck.

The rest? Market growth, baby! At some point, this gravy train will have to pull into a station and we’ll have another recession, but until then, it’s making my net worth numbers look real good.

Cars: -$163

Darn you, car!

Other Assets: No Change

Honestly, this might be a mistake but I don’t care enough to look into it. It’s such a small amount of money, that even if it is wrong, it’s only off by about $20 or so. And it’s possibly not a mistake: I did see that Lending Club managed to recover some of my previously-written off money through a collections effort. So maybe they managed to collect the exact amount that I lost/withdrew from the account this month? Wild if true!

Student Loans: -$76

Minimum payment paid on time as usual. The plan is still to tackle these eventually, after the braces are paid for, and IRA contributions are maxed out. So in theory, I could start paying these down aggressively toward the end of the year. Maybe. We’ll see.

Credit Card: -$72

The minimum payment for the 0% interest credit card for my braces (not to be confused with the cash missing for my husband’s braces, yes, we both currently have braces and look even more like children). I have cash put aside to pay this off when the 0% rate is close to ending, but I’m riding the interest I earn on my savings until then. (Remember that I’m pretty good at getting up to 5% interest on a savings accounts.)

Other Debts: -$250

No, I didn’t pay a big tax bill or anything, I actually spent money and this went down. Because I spent money on my business! Money reinvested in the business removed a growing liability (I account each month for how much I need to put away for hosting and site security), and it lowers my estimated tax bill, as well.

On top of that spending, I also bought Julie & Cody’s VIP Etsy Printables online course. Launching an Etsy store with digital downloads and printables relating to Poorer Than You has been something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, and I knew this course would save me hours of doing my own research and get me to just start. My Etsy store isn’t quite ready to show you (I need to launch a few more products in the shop before I start spreading the word about it), but I promise I’ll give it a proper debut here when it is ready. Along with some more posts about my budget wedding, because my first few products are all tools that I built to help me successfully plan that.

Milestone Progress

Debt Freedom: Undebt.it is still telling me that in order to stay on track and be debt free by May 2024 I need to put $55.55 extra toward my debt every month. Which means I didn’t get behind by not paying the extra $55.55 this month. But as I said above in “student loans,” it won’t be until the end of the year that I do put any extra there, if at all. So this date should creep further and further out, until I start focusing on debt freedom specifically.

$200,000 in Retirement Accounts: Another good month in the stock market brings this a bit closer! $77,188 left to go, 49 months remaining to get there “on time” (according to the arbitrary time frame I put on it). $1,575 per month, minus HSA ($583) and IRA ($500) contributions is just $492 in stock market growth needed. So, about that recession… think you could wait until after the next 49 months? Please?

Without much time to think this month, I wasn’t really expecting such a great outcome! It was a nice surprise to have the numbers turn out this way after a month of hard work. That may seem silly, but in the early days of my net worth tracking, I could work hard all month and have nothing to really show for it. Finally, those seeds planted are producing fruit!

I run these numbers by hand in a spreadsheet, and you could do the same, or you can check out Personal Capital for some automagical tracking. You and I each get a $20 Amazon gift card if you sign up through me and then link it up to at least one valid investment account.

Either way, add it up and let me know if you’re more in “seed planting” or “fruit harvesting” mode!

Time Travel

Net Worth Update: June 2019

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In my rush to finally get a blog post written last month, I neglected to mention that it marked the 10th anniversary of my college graduation ceremony. Of course, thanks to the Great Recession and a complete lack of knowing-what-the-heck-I-was-meant-to-do-in-this-world, it would be another four months before I could find even gig work to “enter the workforce.” So it’s amazing to me to see how far I’ve come since then, which is why I’m so glad I keep these net worth posts up, even when things get hectic.

So I’m pretty proud to have this post for you now, despite an honestly insane week. Here’s what’s happened with my money since our last check-in:

Change: +$4,022 | +3.53%

June Net Worth TOTAL: $117,983

 

June 2019 Net Worth Chart | Poorer Than You

June 2019 Net Worth Breakdown | 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.) 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: -$8,993

RIP my cash! But it looks way worse than it really is. First of all, $5,560 of that was specifically for paying off my old 0% interest credit card from my student loan refinance (the 0% promo expired this month). So that’s 60% of the decrease right there.

My first paycheck was pretty tiny this month, because I took a bunch of time off the last two weeks of May (and that paycheck hit in June). My husband, toddler, and I took turns passing a basic-b cold back and forth, and then recovered just in time to go on a planned family trip to CampFI. Camp was great and we had a lot of fun (though my recovering throat wasn’t 100% back in business, so I had practically no voice for the entire trip). And there wasn’t a lot of spending because of it: we paid for the tickets last year and meals were included, so the only expenses this late in the game were snacks to bring, a tank of gas to drive there and back, and a couple of road meals on the way.

Another blow to my cash reserves: car repairs! Those technically all came out of cash, but I’ll talk about them below in the “Cars” category because for once I actually have something to say about my car, don’t take this from me!

Finally, we sent a big chunk of cash off to… retirement! YES!

Retirement: +$7,526

Ah, the sweet sweet sound of a market recovery! I did actually take advantage of the “down” market to make a retirement contribution, but not because I was trying to time the market. Rather, it was just because we had finished saving for my braces (yay!) so we had the extra cash to do so.

BUT! That contribution is not actually shown in this number, because 100% of this month’s retirement contribution went into my husband’s IRA. Yes, it’s the “marriage penalty” at work—where there’s a large decrease in my cash numbers, and no extra gain in retirement. Don’t worry, it’ll balance out later. It’s just that because my husband is slightly older, we always contribute to his IRA first (until we’ve maxed it out for the year), then switch to contributing to mine.

So, this number is actually really impressive, as it’s just my regular ~$580 HSA contribution, and the rest is alllllllll market gains. Good job, stock market! (Though if you want to drop back down again when it’s time to contribute to my IRA, I’m not going to be opposed.)

Cars: +$26

I have no idea why the value went up! I never know!

But, I mentioned car repairs up above, so I’ll talk about those here even though that’s actually “cash” and has nothing to do with the “cars” number. It’s not too exciting, but my car was making some funky noises while turning, so we took it into the shop. We lucked out big time, as it turned out that a friend had recently been transferred to our shop to manage it, and after trolling me a bit on the phone, he gave me the Friends & Family discount. (No, he didn’t tell me that my headlight fluid needed to be replaced, I woulda caught that one!)

Then, about a week later… a small spiderweb crack on my windshield! It was small enough and low enough that my car might have passed inspection with it there, but rather than waste any time, I had it repaired right away. Inspection and emissions and registration were all due this month, so all told, I put about $1,000 into the car this month.

It was fine, because I keep a “car maintenance fund” (the steering repair and the windshield came out of that) and also the inspection, emissions, and registration are all known yearly/biyearly costs that come out of my “occasionals fund.”

Other Assets: +$1

Woooo watch out now everybody, my Lending Club account gain a dollar this month! WE’VE GOT A HIGH ROLLER UP IN HERE!

Student Loans: -$74

Automatic minimum payment, absolutely nothing extraordinary to see here.

Credit Card: -$5,434

I already let the cat out of the bag on this one in the “Cash” section, but in case that was too “wall of text”y for ya: I finished paying off the 0% interest credit card from my student loan “refinance.” The promo rate was expiring, and I’d saved up the cash to pay it all in one fell swoop.

Now what remains is the new 0% interest credit card I got last month for my braces. Wee!

Other Debts: +$45

Just my tax and expense liability for my side hustles, mainly this blog. My web hosting bill (paid biyearly) is due next month, so the liability is up pretty high from preparing for that.

I may further simplify this category by subtracting it from the business bank accounts (which are counted in Cash, so the whole value of the business would be counted in Cash that way). Mostly, I’m tempted to simplify it so that once I pay off my other debts, I actually show up as debt free on these reports! Ha!

Milestone Progress

Debt Freedom: So after messing this all up by taking on another 0% interest credit card for my braces, Undebt.it is telling me that in order to stay on track and be debt free by May 2024 – I just need to put $55.55 extra toward my debt every month. Doable, though I don’t think I’m going to jump in and do that right away. I’m very interested in maxing out my retirement accounts for this year before I send anything extra to the student loans. But at least prioritizing that will help with the other milestone:

$200,000 in Retirement Accounts: The growth in my retirement accounts this month will help with this! $80,599 left to go. 50 months remaining to get there “on time” (according to the arbitrary time frame I put on it). That’s $1,611.98 per month (on average). My regular contributions ($500/month to the IRA, which I don’t do every month, but it works out to $500 because the yearly max is $6,000; plus $583 to the HSA) total $1083.33. So that means that stock market growth only needs to be $528.65 per month. Think you can handle that, stock market? Help a girl out here? I feel like you can do it.

All in all, this was a really solid month and I’m happy with how it turned out. It’s nice, since last month was kinda an 0n-paper disaster. Running the numbers brings a sense of calm and relief in the chaos of day-to-day money happenings.

I run these numbers by hand in a spreadsheet, and you could do the same, or you can check out Personal Capital for some automagical tracking. You and I each get a $20 Amazon gift card if you sign up through me and then link it up to at least one valid investment account.

Either way, add it up and let me know if it’s more “calm” or more “storm” for you, in the comments below!

Time Travel

Net Worth Update: May 2019

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Well, I up and disappeared for nearly a month again. I probably should have known that doing some travel the last weekend of the month would throw everything off kilter, but I didn’t realize how much off things would get. And, to be honest, maybe I didn’t want to write about this month any sooner than I had to? I mean…

Change: -$9,615 or -7.78%

May Net Worth TOTAL: $113,961

May 2019 Net Worth Chart | Poorer Than YouMay 2019 Net Worth Breakdown | Poorer Than You

Well… fiddlesticks.

Okay, okay, it’s not that bad. All things considered, I’m actually quite pleased with the month of May. It’s just hard to speak nicely of a nearly-8-percent drop! Here’s what happened:

Cash: -$1,502

Soooo many things moved around in the “Cash” category this month. The most important bit by far is that I dropped $5,413 on a credit card for my braces. These shiny, painful hunks of metal in my mouth are now my lifetime second-largest purchase, after my shiny silver Camry. (Apparently, I buy expensive silver things. Who knew?)

But, the month was not down by over $5,000, despite the ginormous purchase. A good chunk of it was paid just from paychecks, but that wasn’t all of it (especially because we had some sickness run through the household in the middle of the month, and actually worked less than usual, urgh). Another big chunk of the blow was cushioned because I opened up two more new credit cards, and managed to hit the minimum spend on each of them for big fat bonuses of $958 for the month. Woohoo!

One of those new credit cards had a 0% interest, $0 fee balance transfer offer and 0% interest on new purchases for 12 months… but we’ll come back to that in the “credit cards” category.

Retirement: -$6,186

This is where my net worth really took the beating in May. But, although it certainly isn’t joyful to look at, it really doesn’t bother me much. Just like I can’t take much credit when there’s a big increase due to market movement, I also can’t feel too bad when there’s a big drop for the same reason.

Market’s gonna do what the market’s gonna do. I’m just along for the ride, aside from contributing when I can. This month, no contributions above the usual amount into the HSA from my paychecks. It’s alright – I’ll get back to my retirement accounts when we’re done buying shiny hardware for inside our mouths!

Cars: -$86

The fact that I still track my car’s value makes me wonder if I should track the value of my braces, too! Of course, they have no resale value at all, so I guess they would just show as “-$5,413” this month and then $0 for the rest of time. Ha!

Other Assets: -$22

I continue to pull my money out of Lending Club. I also cashed some checks that were in here as “uncashed checks.” Exciting! Those moved into “Cash,” as you might imagine.

Student Loans: -$148

Another “double” month, since the month before the payment didn’t hit in time for the net worth update, so this is April and May’s principal payments combined. I’ll be continuing to just auto-pay the minimum on this until retirement accounts are maxed out for the year.

Credit Cards: +$1,971

Yup, I increased my credit card debt this month. As I mentioned above in “Cash,” I had opened a couple of new credit cards for the spending bonuses on my braces. One of them also came with a sweet 0% interest balance transfer offer, with no fee. So I gladly transferred as much as it would let me ($5,000) and also put all of my other regular spending for the month on the card at 0%, until I hit the bonus threshold.

So the credit card balance for this month should have been up by nearly $7,000, but it wasn’t. That’s because the $5,000 I transferred was from my existing (and soon expiring) 0% interest credit card, from last year when I transferred a big chunk of my student loan to a credit card. I then used half of the cash I had saved up to pay off that card to pay the new card with the braces bill on it.

If this sounds like a big old shell game, it really is! I shuffled from card to card, to get as much as possible at 0% for as long into the future as possible. I already have the cash to pay it off, so it’s just a matter of maximizing the interest I earn on that cash in the meantime. More on that next month.

Other Debts: -$4

I simplified what goes into this category a bit, since it was starting to get unwieldy. I stopped counting my mounting life insurance and car insurance “debts” (the monthly increase towards what I pay every 6 or 12 months), and to balance it, I stopped counting the cash saved up for those in the “Cash” category as well.

For now, this is just my tax liability for my self-employment activities (this blog, and anything else I do under my writing business).

Okay, so, you see how that wasn’t so bad after all? Sure, the numbers were down an amount that might have given me a heart attack 10 years ago, but for innocent reasons: I finally paid for the final big chunk of my much-needed dental work, and the stock market took a tumble.

It might not be pretty, but at least it’s honest.

Milestone Progress

Debt Freedom: Okay, by taking on more 0%-interest debt, I’m a bit further away from this than I was before. And boy, did I make a mess out of Undebt.it by keying in all of the balance transfers and wacky payments this month! But, I managed to set it up so that I’m still on track to be debt free by May 2024 – I just need to put $55.55 extra toward my debt every month to stay on track (on top of paying off the 0% card with the money I already have saved up to do so with, at the end of the 12-month promo period).

$200,000 in Retirement Accounts: Well, that drop in the market this month is not doing me any favors! 51 months remaining to get there “on time” (according to the arbitrary time I put on it). $88,125 to go. That’s $1727.94 per month, which feels like a bit of stretch. But HSA + IRA contribution limits add up to $1,083/month, so that’s just $645 in growth needed per month. Even with months like this one, that doesn’t seem out of the realm of probability, for the long term. Just gotta keep plugging away at those contributions when I can!

A lot of this seems incredible to me, impossible even, until I run the numbers and see how it really is doable. If you aren’t tracking your net worth regularly, it may seem impossible to you, too! But I encourage you to give it a go, just to see what’s possible.

I run these numbers by hand in a spreadsheet, and you could do the same, or you can check out Personal Capital for some automagical tracking. You and I each get a $20 Amazon gift card if you sign up through me and then link it up to at least one valid investment account.

Either way, add it up and let me know if it blows your mind, in the comments below!

Time Travel

Net Worth Update: April 2019

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This net worth update is coming in a bit late because last week was wack-a-doodle busy for me. As if things weren’t already busy-busy with work, a toddler, online businesses, and everything else I try to cram into my life… I finally got my braces put on last week! But, that happened just after the end of the month, so it won’t be covered in this update. Whomp whomp. Still, these are the final round of numbers in the lead-up to that big expense, so let’s dig in to what will probably be the peak of the net worth mountain (for a little while):

Change: +$8,513 or +7.40%

April Net Worth TOTAL: $123,576

April 2019 Net Worth Chart | Poorer Than YouApril 2019 Net Worth Breakdown | Poorer Than YouHoly moly… was not expecting that! Okay, to be fair, I wasn’t really expecting anything. The busyness this month created a “just hang on and get through it all” mentality and I had exactly zero expectations of what the numbers were going to be. So, let’s dig into the categories and learn together just what happened this month… because I sincerely don’t even know.

Cash: +$3,121

This is where the meat of it happened this month, so there’s a lot of ground to cover. There wasn’t any one big thing that made up the greater-than-$3,000 cash increase this month. It was a lot of little things (or, medium things, I guess). Our tax refund from the Commonwealth of Virginia finally came in. I got a second $300 bonus from Chase for having opened new checking and savings accounts with them.

Counter-intuitively, we spent quite a bit of money this month. My yearly life insurance premium came due as it always does in April, and I paid for that and a few other expenses using Plastiq and a new credit card. I’ve been working on “churning” credit card bonuses as a tactic to drum up money for our dental work, and by doing this we cleared another $500 bonus this month.

There were some true “little” things, but even they added up pretty significantly. A lot of you seem to be excited about earning 5% interest on your savings and signed up for NetSpend accounts last month, so I got some bonus money from that. We sold more video games on eBay, and that’s easy money. I also cut off my hair and prepared the ponytail for eBay, though I haven’t listed it yet, so that doesn’t show up in this month’s total. (This is not at all the first time I’ve sold my hair on eBay.)

Put it together and what have you got? Bippity-boppity-three-thousand-one-hundred-twenty-one-dollars, believe it or not!

Retirement: +$4,843

More money than the first category! And way less exciting! Okay, not less exciting (woooooo money!), but less interesting to talk about. Everything in the cash category was active, and lifehacky, and “hey look I did things!” But here in retirement? It’s the same story. every. month.

There weren’t any unusual contributions this month, just the usual HSA contributions from my paychecks. That’s it, the rest was all growth.

Not that I mind growth, of course, not in the least. Especially after all those months at the end of last year, where the stock market was having a time of it and going down right when I was supposed to be crossing the $100k net worth milestone. No, I am thankful for the growth.

But it doesn’t leave me much to say here. I don’t ever even know the stock market is doing well until I run these numbers. Because that’s one of my secrets-to-success: I only look at my investments once a month, when I do my net worth report. It keeps me from poking at them, moving things around, making little “adjustments,” or just plain panicking and moving all my money into silver doubloons. That sort of meddling works really well with cash (see above) and is horrible for investments.

Cars: -$41

Okay, I’ve got even less to say here. My car depreciated a little and no one is surprised, since that’s what cars do. It did get an oil change this month, so it’s got that going for it.

Other Assets: +$53

These were purely some uncashed checks:

Credit card rewards from a card that I’m not using much these days, my Citi Doublecash, which is my “daily driver” when I’m not credit card bonus churning… but I am right now. So rather than get the rewards as a “statement credit” on a card I’m not using, I requested a check, and here that is.

A refund check for a late fee from Plastiq for a payment that got lost in the mail. So, I now know what happens if you pay a bill through Plastiq and the check doesn’t make it! Not the greatest thing that ever happened, of course, but I don’t blame Plastiq. (I interact with the postal service enough in my day job to be confident in saying THEY LOSE STUFF MORE THAN YOU THINK.) Plastiq was quick to help me fix the issue. After confirming that the check never made it, they refunded my money (so I could make an instant payment on the biller’s website to bring my account current), and I submitted a screenshot of the late fee, which they sent me a check for.

Student Loans: No change

So now that my girl Elizabeth Warren (who I’ve been a fangirl of pretty much since the start of this blog) has announced that she’s running for President of the United States, and has announced her plan to cancel the student loan debt of 95% of Americans… I see no reason whatsoever to make any of my student loan payments anymore.

I’m kidding. Of course. Well, only about the last part where I stopped paying my student loans. (I am super pumped that EW is running for prez, as you might imagine.)

Rather, the reason there was no change in my student loan balance is super mundane: my due date was the last Sunday of the month and the payment didn’t hit my balance before it was time to run the numbers. That’s it.

Though, in the larger scheme of things, I have been thinking about how much it might not make sense for me to focus on paying off my student loan debt if there’s a chance that Senator Warren could win the presidency and cancel my remaining debt. There is an argument to be made for only paying my minimums until my debt gets canceled, or she gets knocked out of the election race.

It doesn’t matter as anything more than a thought experiment for me at the moment, since the dental work is taking up all extra money that would otherwise be available for paying off my student loans. I just love a good thought experiment!

Credit Card: -$107

Speaking of only paying the minimum on things, I did it again. As a quick refresher, this is a 0% interest credit card that I used to “refinance” some of my student loans. I actually did something very interesting with this the other day… but… that was in May and not April, so you’ll just have to wait until next month to find out what. 😉

Other Debts: -$430

What goes up must come down, which is actually a good thing when it comes to debts. Because I paid my life insurance bill in April, the liability I count for it went down! Now time for it to slowly start creeping up again for next year.

Milestone Progress

Debt Freedom: No progress again this month, so May 2024 is still the calculated date. And like I said in the Student Loans category above, it makes a lot of sense to wait on this and see. Not that I was ever super aggressive about becoming “debt free,” but now I have even more incentive to sit on my hands a bit with it. As crazy as that sounds!

$200,000 in Retirement Accounts: Currently $118,061, so just $81,939 remaining. The “goal” is to hit it 5 years after hitting $100k in retirement, which is 52 months from now. That will take growth/contributions of about $1,576/month. That seems all too doable given how things have been going. And considering HSA + IRA contribution limits add up to $1,083/month, to say nothing of my Solo 401(k). Is this even real life?

If you’ve never run net worth numbers before, you may question the nature of your reality too, the first time you do it!

I run these numbers by hand in a spreadsheet, and you could do the same, or you can check out Personal Capital for some automagical tracking. You and I each get a $20 Amazon gift card if you sign up through me and then link it up to at least one valid investment account.

Either way, add it up and let me know if it blows your mind, in the comments below!

Time Travel

Net Worth Update: March 2019

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Happy April! In case you missed it, I continued the April Fools’ Day tradition around here with a bit of fun-poking around the idea of “mindset” and FI foods. Once the cat was out of the bag about the joke, I turned it into a game with a fun little prize: an Amazon gift card for whomever can name the most sources for the fun food references in the post! There are still a few days left and no one has yet been able to name all 33, so that prize could be yours!

In the meantime, let’s jump on into March’s numbers:

Change: +$8,248 or +7.72%

March Net Worth TOTAL: $115,063

March 2019 Net Worth Chart | Poorer Than You March 2019 Net Worth Breakdown | Poorer Than YouAnother month of doing okay!

I’m kidding. EIGHT FREAKING THOUSAND DOLLARS WHAT?!? Even though that’s not my “best month ever,” that’s amazing!

The explanation, though, is really pretty simple.

Cash: +$870

Most months I’ve been hoarding cash for bank account opening bonuses and for my upcoming dental work (oh joy). But this month, not so much! Instead, we dumped cash into our 2018 Traditional IRAs (Individual Retirement Accounts). This was planned for, so it wasn’t a hit, but it does mean that cash didn’t grow much this month, despite getting a big ol’ fat tax refund.

Grizzly Bears Fighting
As per usual, don’t yell at me about a tax refund being an “interest free loan to the government.” Not unless you want to bring out my yelling-back-at-you Momma Bear side.

Okay, understandably, some folks really may wonder why I chose to get a big tax refund this year, rather than keep my withholding low and invest throughout the year.

Well, the simple answer is: a lot of things changed from last year’s taxes, and we had absolutely no idea what this year’s taxes were going to look like. I didn’t know that my freelance client was going to stop giving me work, so I was withholding assuming that I’d get about $15,000 in work from them again in 2018, but instead, I got $0. Which is fine, but it means I over-withheld. By a lot.

We also didn’t qualify for Obamacare (ACA) subsidies in 2018 because, well, we were no longer on an ACA plan! So we didn’t know how that was going to shake up our taxes, and better safe than sorry to over-withhold.

So we got a big tax refund and we shoved it all into Traditional IRAs, which further grew our tax refund. It’s a fun virtuous circle that never ends! Until you hit the $5,500 per person contribution limit, that is. ($6,000 per person in 2019.)

Retirement: +$6,848

Right, so, I put $5,500 into the Traditional IRA. And I did my normal HSA contributions from my paycheck, as always. The remaining $700 or so was stock market growth, and that’s all she wrote!

Car: +$63

My car value is up again this month. Still basically irrelevant, still don’t know why it would be going up several months in a row… maybe 2004 Camrys are super hot right now? I know teens these days are wearing 90s mom jeans, so maybe it’s related. Seems like if you’re wearing mom jeans as a norm-core fashion statement, you probably need a silver Camry to complete the look.

Other Assets: -$15

My Lending Club account is nearly depleted! Gone soon, I imagine. Alas, poor Lending Club… it never lived up to what I wanted it to be.

Student Loan: -$150

Last month there was no change because the short month meant my end-of-February payment didn’t show up. Well, this month, we get the two-fer! February and March payments now reflected, so it’s double down. How exciting!

Credit Card: -$108

0% interest credit card and I have the cash to pay it off so I just pay the minimums for now… if you’ve been following along a while, you know the drill here!

One little fun update: Bank of America actually sent me an email this month to let me know the exact date that the promo rate is ending, and give me 90 days of warning. That’s nice, because I don’t like relying on my own calculation of “I signed up this date and it was a 15-month promo, therefore…” Seems too likely that I’d get hit with some sort of “gotcha.” But to have the end date in writing from the bank itself? PERFECT!

Other Debts: -$225

Car insurance payment month! Which means the “debt” that I calculate as growing every six months to pay it is now paid off. And it starts again!

Milestone Progress

Debt Freedom: No extra payments this month (again), so May 2024 is still the calculated date. Still more literal teeth to pull (and to pay for) and then I can think about switching us to debt-payoff mode again.

$200,000 in Retirement Accounts: Currently at $113,218 with $86,782 left to go! The “goal” is to hit it 5 years after hitting $100k in retirement, which is 53 months from now. That will take growth/contributions of about $1,637/month. That seems very reasonable, once we get past all this “paying for dental work” stuff, anyway!

Not super exciting in the explanation this month, but that’s how I like it! Boring, with big numbers.

I run these numbers by hand in a spreadsheet, and you could do the same, or you can check out Personal Capital for some automagical tracking. You and I each get a $20 Amazon gift card if you sign up through me and then link it up to at least one valid investment account.

Either way, add it up and let me know how you’re doing in the comments, below!

Time Travel

Photo credit: Steppinstars

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