Poorer Than You

Money: It's Not Just For Rich People

Net Worth Update: February 2019

By , updated 6 Comments
This post may contain affiliate links

At this point, I think February is just getting shorter every year. It’s a weird, sick joke. I’m convinced there will never be another leap year, and eventually the calendar is going to try to pass off a single day, February 1st, as a whole month. I’m on to you, calendar! I know your weird tricks! Ahem. Well, because this month is exponentially shorter than every February before it, this month’s update isn’t super exciting. At least today, March Fourth, is the only complete sentence on the calendar (albeit, a misspelled one)!

Change: $6,491 or +6.47%

January Net Worth TOTAL: $106,815

February 2019 Net Worth Chart | Poorer Than YouFebruary 2019 Net Worth Breakdown | Poorer Than YouHot diggity dog, everything’s coming up Stephonee! Let’s dig in:

Cash +$2,259

Another lovely month of hoarding cash reserves! A good chunk of this was from selling old video games on eBay to pay for our dental work.

Speaking of, I had the rest of my wisdom teeth extracted this month! It wasn’t too bad, thankfully, and I saved a boatload by going to an in-network oral surgeon (duh) and by opting for just local anesthetic. A lot of people tried to talk me into getting “put under,” but considering the procedure didn’t bother me (I guess I’m weird that way) and took less than five minutes, I was glad that I didn’t. I was able to drive myself home, so we didn’t have to find childcare or a ride for me during the middle of the day, either.

Retirement: +$4,351

The stock market is a-rebounding! (I guess?) I didn’t get a chance to make any manual contributions during this short month, so aside from my automatic HSA deductions from my paycheck, that was all market growth.

Car: +$47

It goes down, it goes up, who knows why? Thought it does need an oil change and now one of the seat belts is twisted and stuck—thankfully for a seat we don’t often use, but still, annoying!

Other Assets: -$28

I continue to withdraw cash from my Lending Club account as it gets paid, and it looks like one of my borrowers paid off their loan in full, because there was a good amount of cash in there this month. (Well, you know, like $28, which is only a “good amount” in relation to the $44 remaining balance!) Good for you, borrower! I certainly prefer a payoff to a default.

Student Loan: no change

Ah, don’t worry—it’s not because I missed my payment. It’s that February “short month” thing. My payments are auto-debited on the 28th, so February payments never reconcile by the time of the net worth update. Next month will show double, and that’s fine.

Credit Card: -$109

Still no excitement here. Despite the fact that it seems to make people nervous that I carry around almost $11k in credit card debt, I’m not making any moves to pay it off early.

Reminders: the credit card is still under a 0% interest promo, and I have the cash to pay it off, but I’m currently using that to earn a tasty $300 bank bonus.

Other Debts: +$247

Next year’s business taxes + life insurance + car insurance. It’ll go down next month (car insurance payment due!) and then it’ll climb back up again.

Milestone Progress

Debt Freedom: I didn’t make any extra payments to debt this month, so we’re still looking at May 2024, as far as I can tell. That may change in the next few months, once we get past my dental work and find out how much my husband’s is going to cost. Right now I’m just waiting for the holes where my wisdom teeth used to be to heal up, then I can schedule my appointment to get braces (and three more teeth extracted, yay?) and then schedule my husband’s braces consultation. Boy howdy, isn’t this an exciting paragraph of debt payoff and literal teeth pulling? I know how to party, I tell ya!

$200,000 in Retirement Accounts: Currently at $106, 370, so $93,630 left to go! And the “goal” is to hit it 5 years after hitting $100k in retirement, so August 2023 (54 months from now). That’s $1,733.89 per month, which doesn’t seem crazy. Though, the past 6 months have not done that well (only catching up a bit the last 2), so who knows? It may be one of the milestones I blow past way early, or it may be a long slog—all depends on what the market does over the next few years.

Bonus: Veronika of Debts to Riches is Celebrating Her First $100k in Growth!

Aw yeah, Veronika!

This milestone is pretty near and dear to my heart, since I only just achieved it myself about a year ago, my first $100k in net worth growth. (As soon as I opened up that post to link to it, I was like “Didn’t I JUST write this? Didn’t I JUST find these gifs?!?”) But, since it’s been a little over a year, I can now say with authority that it really was that the first $100k was the hardest. Or at least, I seem to have hit a steady stream of other milestones ever since.

Awesome job Veronika!!

How did you fare during this obnoxiously short month? I run my net worth 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.

Time Travel

Net Worth Update: February 2018

By , updated 2 Comments
This post may contain affiliate links

Is it just me, or is February even shorter than it’s supposed to be? Like, missing 2-3 days compared to other months is one thing, but I’m having some serious “no really where did the time go?” feels right now. It hardly felt like enough time to do anything this month, let alone make any progress at all on my net worth. But I guess the numbers are telling a different story…

Change: +$3,284 or +4.00%

February Net Worth TOTAL: $85,393

February 2018 Net Worth Chart | Poorer Than You February 2018 Net Worth Breakdown | Poorer Than You

It was a busy, busy month, so let’s dig down into the categories!

Cash: +$275

A few unusual things happened with my cash accounts this month:

New Recurring Expense: Pre-school!

Well, more like pre-pre-pre-pre-school in our child’s case. School doesn’t start until this autumn, but there was the application fee to pay this month, and then next month we’ll see the hit of the initial tuition deposit. The school isn’t too expensive, and we’ll spend the time working to more than make up the cost, and it qualifies us for the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (so we’ll get 20% of the costs back in our taxes). But it is a new recurring expense to manage, so I’m working it into our spending plan now.

SPLURGE ALERT:

The $300 Clek Fllo Convertible Car SeatI bought a pretty pricey car seat, the Clek Fllo ($299.99 on Amazon at the time of my purchase). I started writing all about this purchase, but the explanation got really long. It’s-own-post long. So I cut it out of here and we’ll just leave it for another time. But the TL;DR is that it fits with my values and my husband’s values, so of course we’re going to spend the money in that case. Why else do we do all this saving money and financial well-being stuff if not to be able to make meaningful purchases?

New HSA!

I now have an HSA through my employer at the day job, and so this means some additional savings in cash. I consider HSA funds that are invested in stocks or bonds in my “Retirement” category, but anything in an HSA in cash is, well, cash. Category-wise. This new HSA account requires the first $1000 be kept in cash before anything above that can be invested, so it will be another month or so before I can invest within the new account. Unless I transfer the balance from the old account into the new one, which I will probably do. But it’ll be a few weeks before I can invest, either way.

You may recall that I had managed to max out our HSA by March of last year, but that won’t be the case this year. Since I’m doing the contributions through an employer (having it taken straight out of my paycheck), the money comes out tax free (including no Social Security or Medicare taxes!). This is a part of the quadruple tax advantage of an employer-sponsored HSA:

  1. Exempt from federal and state income tax going in
  2. Exempt from Social Security and Medicare (FICA) taxes going in
  3. Tax-free growth and trades within the account
  4. Tax-free coming out if used to pay for qualified medical expenses

Retirement: -$3,147

Hey remember last month when I had big growth in my retirement accounts and referenced that early 2000s Shaggy hit, “It Wasn’t Me?” Same deal this month, but opposite effect. The markets have been “crashing” (hahaha whatever) or at least “correcting” this month. And I didn’t contribute anything this month (soooooon though… as in, within the first few days of March, actually), so naturally, the balance is down.

Though this hampers my milestone progress (see below) a bit, I really don’t care. In fact, as usual, I’m happy about a correction in the stock market. It’s called a “sale” and I’m in the buying phase of my life. Why wouldn’t I want stocks to be on sale? Again, I’m buying within the next few days!

Stocks are down? GOOD! Grumpy cat is buying.
Grumpy cat is also buying.

“Other” Assets (Tax Refund): +$6,341

I filed our taxes in February (finally, after waiting on a 1099-MISC form, which turned out to be wrong when it finally arrived, and then waiting on the corrected version), and whoa were we due a big refund!

Now, I’m gonna get this in before someone jumps out of the bushes and yells “YOU SHOULD ADJUST YOUR W-4 WITHHOLDING SO THAT YOU DON’T GET A REFUND BECAUSE THAT’S AN INTEREST-FREE LOAN TO THE GOVERNMENT, YO!”

W-4 Withholding Bear Doesn't Want You to Have a Tax Refund

 

  1. Calm down. Savings account interest rates still aren’t what they used to be so “interest-free loan to the government” is overblown. Last year, most high-yield savings accounts capped out at 1.05% APY (except my 5% NetSpend and Insight card accounts).
  2. My refund didn’t come from having too much withheld in our paychecks (the W-4 withholding form part). Gasp!
  3. Rather, it’s because of that huge friggin Obamacare subsidy that we got for 2017. But we were never sure up until the end of the year if we would qualify, so we chose not to have the subsidy applied to the health insurance premiums we paid, and chose to get it at tax time. Thanks Obama.
  4. Oh, and it also wasn’t interest free because we paid those health insurance premiums with rewards credit cards (and paid the credit card balances off in full each month – very important!). So we got at least 2% back on each payment (sometimes a lot more, thanks to credit card signup bonus).
  5. Stop hiding in bushes and jumping out and yelling at people about their tax withholding strategies. You don’t make friends that way.

So yeah, were it not for the Obamacare tax credit, our refund would have been a measly $10 or so for the federal return. Which is right where the bush-jumping Withholding Police want you to be. So there. (And we’re not on an Obamacare marketplace health plan this year, so it’s irrelevant going forward.)

Student Loans: $0 change

Just an annual reminder that February is a short month, so my payment never settles before the end of the month and it looks like I didn’t make a payment. It balances out with a seemingly “double” payment every March or April (depending on where the weekends fall), so whatever.

Milestone Progress

$100,000 Net Worth: Not there yet! (So no gifs.) Thanks a lot stock market sale! To get there by the end of 2018, I calculated last month that I need $1,626 in net worth growth each month. So this month, I made another 2 months of progress! Recalculating it now, I need just $1,461 of growth each month to get there by the end of the year. That number just keeps going down! 😀

That’s it for February! How are your numbers looking this month?

If you’d like to see how I stack up against other personal finance bloggers, be sure to check out The Ultimate List of Blogger Net Worths over on the Rockstar Finance directory!

Photo credits: Clek/Amazon, Grumpy Cat/ImgFlip, Richard Lee

Net Worth Update: February 2017

By , updated 4 Comments
This post may contain affiliate links

February has been a month of reflection for me: between doing the 30-day money cleanse, doing our taxes, and generally reading & writing more about money (again). I also got “back” to work (from home) this month, which of course has been an adjustment. So, did it all help? Is my net worth growing at all?

Net Worth Graph for February 2017 | PoorerThanYou.com

Change: +$3,129 or +8.93 %

February Net Worth TOTAL: $38,149

I guess the work this month did pay off, after all! This puts me within spitting distance of achieving the 1st goal I came up with for the 30-day money cleanse: Hit a net worth of $38,901 by June 2017. Looks like June is totally doable! 😀

Here’s what went into February’s net worth jump:

Leaning Off of Cash

I’ve long been a proponent of an emergency fund, especially when you first start out with organizing your finances. I grew up watching the people in my life who weren’t good with money bounce from emergency to emergency, always needing cash but relying on credit instead, like a crutch. I saw decisions made about which home repairs to make, and stretching car inspections to months after they were actually due. I wanted to save myself from those types of situations, so I prioritized an emergency fund, even above high interest debt reduction.

But 10 years later, things are different for me. After reading about how ERN over at the Early Retirement Now blog has no emergency fund, I took a look at my own cash reserves. Between emergency funds, a cash buffer in checking, and cash savings (for things like travel, my next car, etc.), my husband and I were sitting on more than six months’ worth of expenses in cash. Not to mention several months’ worth in Roth IRA contributions (which could be taken out at any time with no taxes or penalties), plus hefty amounts of available credit at low interest rates (thanks to years of careful credit building and management).

I found that even if we took away the cash emergency funds and all the money saved up for our next car, there was still more than 3 months’ of expenses in cash in our accounts! So, that’s what I did: we’re currently in the process of moving what used to be labeled “emergency fund” money into investments, as well as the Next Car fund. Note that this only works because we’ve been saving cash up for so long!

Not-So-Much-An-Emergency, No Fund Needed

Also, I’ve severely narrowed the list of things that I consider an “emergency” these days. Car breaking down? That’s not an emergency, that’s a planned-for expense. (I have a “Car Maintenance” savings account for it!) Loss of income? Being a freelancer, I’ve been able to shift and change things whenever that happens, rather than pulling from a fund. Medical issue? An emergency, sure, but I work on maxing out our HSA every year, so that’s its own separate “emergency fund,” and most of it is invested in equities (stocks), not cash.

It’s a bold plan, but after 10 years of financial responsibility, it feels like I’m ready for some bold plans. Cash, earning 0.75%, has been dragging down my portfolio and holding my net worth back. Inflation eats away at it every year. There are a lot of different ways to create security, and successfully outpacing inflation is one of them. My idea is to use a little bit of everything, in order to get ahead. But before now, I was using “cash” too much. 

Taxes

Still working on them! There was a slight hiccup with some 1099s, but that’s been straightened out. Now I’m just waiting until I have a long chunk of time, so that I can test out Credit Karma’s new (free!) tax prep offering and write a review for you nice folks. But in continuing to fiddle with the numbers in TurboTax, I can see that maxing out our HSA and Traditional IRAs for 2016 makes a massive difference in how much we owe in taxes.

$2,857.10 is the difference, in fact! That includes the fact that by maxing out the HSA and IRAs, we go from owing state tax to getting a state refund. We still owe some federal taxes no matter what – ah, the freelancers life! The best part is that because we’re putting the money into investments, that $2,857.10 gets to grow our net worth – rather than going to government coffers. Nice.

That’s really about it for February – an exciting number change, but not much of a story here! Moving money into investments made a huge difference this month. Is anyone surprised?

Bonus Round – Instant Pot?

Oh! One more thing before I totally wrap up the net worth post for the month. Since you guys were so helpful last month with my question about noise-isolating headphones (I got the HyperX Cloud IIs – thanks Chloe!), I figured I’ll ask another:

Our slow cooker is crapping out on us after 5 or so years of heavy use. RIP, 7-quart Crock Pot! I’m trying to decide whether to replace it with the same exact model we have, or to get an Instant Pot. But when I went to look at Instant Pots, I was a little overwhelmed to see that there are five different models! So I’d love to hear some opinions on the Instant Pot, if you have them. I don’t want to over-clutter our kitchen with unnecessary appliances, but we cook at home all the time and I know lots of people love their Instant Pots.

Do you own an Instant Pot? If so, do you love it? Which model do you recommend? Has it replaced a slow cooker for you, or do you have both?

If you’d like to see how I stack up against other personal finance bloggers, be sure to check out The Ultimate List of Blogger Net Worths over on the Rockstar Finance directory! And as a fun bonus, ERN recently did an analysis of the wealth inequality of that list (no seriously, it’s a fun post! analyzing wealth inequality!).

Save

Save

Save

Save

Net Worth Update: February 2016

By , updated 1 Comment
This post may contain affiliate links

Happy Super Tuesday! It’s voting day for the primary elections here in Virginia, so I’ve got to fire this update off fast and then get myself to the voting booth. That’s okay though, because there’s only one major story about what happened to my net worth in February: taxes.

Change: ($548) or -2.31 %

February Net Worth: $23,216

Net Worth Graph February 2016

So about those taxes…

I always strive to do my taxes as early as possible, so that I can either A) get my refund as early as possible or B) if I owe money, know about it as soon as possible. But this year, I had some extra “incentive” to get my taxes done early: angry urgent warning letters from the Health Insurance Marketplace (Obamacare) demanding that I send in proof of my income to justify the tax subsidy I’m getting on my health insurance.

The only thing is… I’m not getting any subsidy on my health insurance. I live in a high cost-of-living area, so in order to make the rent, husband and I have to make more money than the income limit for tax subsidies for Obamacare insurance. I did call up the Marketplace helpline and explained this to the (very nice) woman who answered, but she laid it out for me: it doesn’t matter. Even though I get no subsidy, they still want proof of my income, and if they don’t get it by the March 8th deadline, my health insurance, that I’m paying 100% of the cost for, could be cut off for 30 days or more. Wait, what?!?

But pssh, whatever. I can submit my tax return as the proof they need, and as I said, I tend to do my taxes early anyway. So rather than fighting with the Marketplace, I just started harassing the financial institutions and old jobs that hadn’t sent my husband and me our paperwork on time. And got our taxes done, which always feels good.

Well, it feels goodish. Now that I’m back to being a full-time freelancer, and my husband is one too, we got slapped with a not-unexpected tax bill to the tune of more than $6,000. Oh, and a state refund from Virginia for about $1,500 (which was actually a nice surprise). Again, totally expected, but hey… there’s no way to feel good about paying a $6,000 bill. Trust me, I’ve tried.

Since the husband and I run separate sole-proprietor businesses, but file our taxes as Married Filing Jointly, our tax bill comes out of just one account — the business savings account that’s in my name. So my cash reserves got a big ol’ bump this month as hubby transferred his portion of the tax bill to me, and I’m holding it until the government takes their direct deposit in early April. Hence a bump this month in “Cash,” but also a big bump in “Other liabilities” that more than offsets it.

So really, that’s it. That’s the big story this month. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to run out and do my civic duty. Happy Super Tuesday!

I've gotten more than a fair amount of use out of this piece of 2006 San Diego Comic-Con swag.

Net Worth Update: February – September 2015

By , updated 3 Comments
This post may contain affiliate links

Hello chilllllllllllldren! It’s Three Dog- wait, no, that’s not right. This is Stephonee, not Three Dog. Sorry, I’ve been playing a lot of Fallout 3 recently. But let’s talk about my collection of real-world money, not bottle caps:

February: $15,334 (-$640 or —4.01%)
March: $15,870 (+$535 or +3.49%)
April: $17,841 (+$1,971 or + 12.42%)
May: $23,478 (+$5,637 or +31.60%)
June: $23,298 (-$180 or —0.77%)
July: $23,651 (+$353 or +1.52%)
August: $24,247 (+$596 or +2.52%)

And currently…
September: $22,838 (-$1,409 or —5.81%)

Net Worth Graph - September 2015

Credit Card Debt?!?

Those of you paying close attention and digging deep into the numbers (so, uh, probably no one) would have noticed that starting in February, I had a sudden addition to my Debts: $3148 in credit card debt that totally wasn’t there before.

Before anyone flips their shit on me — here’s the deal:

  1. My husband and I bought a couch, after saving up for it. Obviously, it was a ridiculously expensive couch ($3148!), but it’s a really friggin sweet couch and like I said, we saved up for it. (It’s a Sactional from LoveSac — it comes apart for easy reconfiguration and moving, which fits our renting and having-people-over-lots lifestyle.)
  2. Toward the end of saving up for the couch, I laid in wait. Stalking LoveSac’s website, I waited for the best deal to come up. And then suddenly, a post-holiday sale appeared! 20% off the couch covers and 36-month 0% interest financing. BINGO!
  3. I pounced on that offer like angry Lion King Simba (adult Simba, not JTT-baby Simba). The idea was that I’d get the credit card they were offering (in both my name and my husband’s), improve everyone’s credit scores, and make the monthly payment out of the very savings account where we’d saved up, earning interest on the balance the whole while.
  4. That worked like a charm, but something about only earning 0.75% interest on the money sitting in the savings account bothered me. Probably the “earning less than inflation” thing. So I took all the money out of the couch savings account, and threw it at my highest interest rate (5%) student loan. A month later, I was able to pull together the remaining $635.73 owed on that loan, and knocked it right out.
  5. So now I have one less student loan payment ($79.55/month at 5% interest) and a credit card payment in its place ($88/month at 0% interest).

On the surface, it looks like voodoo trickery: I traded a student loan payment at 5% interest for a credit card payment at 0% interest, and got a free couch out of the deal! Except, no. That’s not what happened at all. That line of thinking completely ignores the months beforehand, when my husband and I spent time and money saving up for the couch/loan payoff. Don’t ever make the mistake of ignoring the hard work part of how these things work.

I’ve Gone Rogue

Wesley: I’m a Rogue Demon Hunter now.
Cordelia: Wow. What’s a rogue demon?

– “Parting Gifts” Angel

Much like Wesley Wyndam-Pryce after his unceremonious firing from the Watcher’s Council (clueless gits!), I’ve left the corporate world once again to go it on my own as an independent contractor. Though there are obvious drawbacks (paying for my own health insurance, pay inconsistency, quarterly estimated taxes), it’s the right course of action for me because of all the tasty benefits:

  • Paying less for my health insurance because I’m not locked into the one-and-only option my previous employer offered
  • Jeans and hoodies all-day erry-day
  • Completely setting my own schedule and changing it on a whim
  • Working with some of my very favorite past coworkers on their current projects
  • Having the amount of money I bring in explicitly tied to the work I produce
  • Pay security: rather than one stream of income, I have multiple now. If one ends, I can just ramp up the others the very next day and see no dip in income.

That last one is probably the biggest, for me. During an email exchange with a high school friend, he told me that he’d never be able to do the “gig economy” thing because he needs that sense of security about where he’ll be in 2-3 years. Fair enough, but for me, I like the sense of security I have about right now and knowing that should a client decide to dump me, or go bankrupt, or even if I just decide I don’t want to work on a certain project anymore, I’m not going to have to scramble to look for work or go on Unemployment. That’s what security means to me.

Heck, it’s why I can write this post in the middle of the day on a Thursday in my pajamas. Because I love being a stereotypical millennial blogger, and also because I can get more writing done if I just tell myself not to shower until I’ve finished a friggin post.

Gooooooooooals!

September 14th, 2014 was my goal date for a positive net worth, and I nailed it. I haven’t set any additional goals since then, but considering it’s been one year since that date, it’s a good time to do a check-in:

+$18,895 year-over-year (September 2014 — September 2015)

Yeah, I’ll take it. That’s some good growth.

It’s not a hugely ambitious goal considering what I’ve already achieved, but I’d like to see my net worth hit $38,901 by September 2016. That’s exactly 7 years after my all-time net worth low of negative $38,901 in September of 2009, so it would be some nice symmetry. Even better if I can manage it in 6 months (by the end of March 2016) instead of a year from now.

Got any other ideas for goals I should set right now? Throw those in the comments — I’d love to know what goals other people come up with for me!

Also, if you’d like to see how I stack up against other personal finance bloggers, be sure to check out The Ultimate List of Blogger Net Worths over on Rockstar Finance!

Recent Posts

Affiliate Links

This page may contain affiliate links. You may read my full affiliate linking policy, but the TL;DR is that I may receive compensation when you click on certain links, I only recommend products or services if I have personally used them, or would use them personally if my own life situation were different.

Connect With Me