Poorer Than You

Money: It's Not Just For Rich People

Net Worth Update: August 2018

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August has come to a close, and you know what that means: the Halloween decorations are all hung with care, the pumpkin beer is in the fridge, and the spoopy books and movies have been put into full rotation again. What? Just my family? Alright, well, you guys are missing out if you’re not already in full-on Halloween celebrations. Just sayin’.

*cue Vincent Price laugh here*

Hopefully, my net worth this month isn’t frightening, though. So let’s split up, search the dark empty creepy house, and come back here with the numbers, okay? You take the hatchet and I’ll take the baseball bat. Oh, all we’ve got are some spreadsheets? Well, that makes sense. Annnnnd go!

Change: +$6,136 or +6.55%

August Net Worth TOTAL: $99,824

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

Okay, I think we can agree that the only scary thing here is how close I got to the $100,000 net worth milestone without actually reaching it this month. WTH!?!

But! But! I did reach a different milestone soooooooo….

It's SHOWTIME!

Yes, successfully completing a milestone of any kind gives me the license to fill this update with gifs! And since we’re definitely on a Halloween kick here, we’ll keep that theme rolling in the gifs. Because I can.

Come, little children. The time's come to play.

Cash: +$841

Finally, the days of hoarding cash have come to an end this month! I guess that’s a mini-milestone itself. (It’s not the milestone that justifies the gifs in this post, that comes in the next section so just hang on.)

Hold Onto Your Butts

But yes, we’ve now got enough in cash held specifically to pay off my 0%-interest credit card before the promo expires in June. So no more need to sock away cash like maniacs preparing for the zombie apocalypse (though they would be hoarding weapons and food, I imagine, as we all know money will have no meaning in the new zombie-infested world).

Thank goodness. Now I can focus on other categories that I like better. Like, oh I don’t know…

Retirement: +$5,110

Gremlins Laughing Hysterically. Because, you know, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a laugh riot.

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas!!! Hi ho, hi ho, it’s over the $100,000 retirement balance milestone we gooooooooo!

With $104,970 in my retirement accounts at the end of the month, I now very officially have more than $100k saved for retirement. That’s spread around in a few different 401(k)s, a Traditional and a Roth IRA, and the investment portion of my HSA [Health Savings Account] (and a tiny SEP-IRA but don’t worry about it).

I can’t claim too much of the “credit” as the market really did the heavy lifting this month. I only made my usual HSA contributions (though it was a 3-paycheck month for me, so that was 1 extra contribution in August).

So it was all your work! (The markets are probably controlled by the dog from the secret ending of Silent Hill 2, anyway)

But still… got there!

Cars: +$189

I never like to dwell on the mysteries of the Kelley Blue Book car value fluctuations.

The Scooby Gang lost the keys to the Batmobile

But, if it’s getting me all that much closer to $100,000 net worth this month… well, I’m not gonna complain.

Student Loans: -$153

Possibly the scariest thing of all the scary things in this post?

The Little Mermaid Signing a Contract
Documentary footage of me, as a 17-year-old, signing up for $42,000 in debt to be bad at making movies.

Oh wait…

Credit Card: -$125

Oh right. Student loan debt refinanced onto a credit card. That’s the scary one. But, as mentioned above in the “Cash” section, I now have 100% of the money needed to pay this off in full when the rate expires. What could go wrong?

Alien egg - tempting fate

Milestone Progress

The Milestone: $100,000 net worth. Only 4 months left to get there on time! But uh… also… I’m only $176 away. And if you don’t think I considered doing some “movie magic” to massage the numbers and “find” $176 somewhere for this update… well… you’ve either underestimated my craftiness, or correctly estimated my laziness. Either way, we’ll get there next month (probably), so whatever. I’ll just be here, waiting.

Buffy spinning in a chair from the episode "Beer Bad." Which is not a favorite episode of mine, but has some good one-liners. The part with Willow and Xander and the fake ID particularly.

Other Milestone: $100,000 in retirement accounts – ACHIEVED!!!

So while my total net worth isn’t at $100,000 yet due to my debts dragging the number down, I do have more than $100,000 in my retirement accounts now.

There's a party in my eye socket and everyone's invited! | Xander, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

So, with that milestone hit, it’s time to line up the next one. I always say that each successive $100,000 should take half the amount of time as the last.

I started saving for retirement in August of 2008 (when I paid off my credit card debt). [What are the odds that I started AND ended my first $100k, in August?!? Like, 1 in 144? Or 1 in 24…? Whatever, that’s spooky timing!] So it took exactly 10 years to build up my first $100,000 in retirement.  The next $100,000 should take me 5 years (ideally, less than that).

Buuuuuuuut… since five years is a lot of years to track a “next” milestone, we’ll just put that on the back burner for now. The next logical milestone is… debt freedom!!!

Debt Student Loans by Ethan Barnowsky

According to the free debt snowball calculator on Undebt.it, I’ll be totally and completely debt-free in December of 2022. Still four years off, I’m afraid. BUT, Undebt.it’s debt snowball chart says that once I pay off the 0% credit card in June 2019, the remainder of my unsubsidized student loan will only take one more month to pay off!

Debt Snowball Master Payoff Plan from Undebt.it | PoorerThanYou
My actual debt snowball table from Undebt.it. Look at that snowballin’ action! (Click to enlarge)

So there we go, the next milestone to start shooting for (after hitting $100,000 in net worth, of course): paid off Unsubsidized Stafford student loan!

BONUS: Simplistic Steph Hit $100,000 Net Worth!

A huge shout-out and congrats to “Simplistic Steph” and her husband Zach for hitting their $100,000 net worth milestone recently! There’s nothing I like seeing more than Stephs getting to $100,000. 😉

Anya and Dawn do the dance of capitalist superiority | Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Normally I don't like to include Dawn in, well, anything, but in this case you can just imagine that it's the two of us "Steph"s doing the dance here.

How about you? Will you be the next milestone-goal-achiever-person featured here? Share your net worth achievements in the comments below or send them to me on the Twitters!

Of course, in order to send me your net worth achievements for celebration, you’ve got to be tracking your net worth! You can do it old-school-horror-movie-style with spreadsheets like I do… or if those are too terrifying, you can let Personal Capital do the wet work (and you get a $20 Amazon gift card for signing up!). 

Net Worth Update: November 2017

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The fourth quarter of every year has been a crazy time for me since… oh… ever? Since 2009 when I first got a job in online retail, certainly. This year is shaping up to be a little less insane, but still busy-busy and keeping me on my toes. One nice thing about being on the retail side of things during the holidays? I hardly ever spend anything on Black Friday. I’m always working, instead of shopping! Gotta make that money. Speaking of that money…

Change: +$5,490 or  +9.19%

November Net Worth TOTAL: $65,212

Net Worth Graph November 2017 | PoorerThanYou Net Worth Breakdown November 2017 | PoorerThanYou Say What? (Moss is impressed with my accomplishment)

Is this… my best month ever? Nope, unfortunately not. That title is still held by February 2014, when I was laid off. Being laid off is strangely lucrative, at least in the short term. I can’t say that it’s a great long-term plan, though. This month’s accomplishment feels a lot better, even if it was less in terms of dollars and cents.

So let’s break it, break it, break it down! (And yes, there will be more gifs. So many more. We hit the milestone, you guys!)

Kathy Najimy breaks it down, because she is also super stoked for me

Retirement

Retirement accounts, you da real MVP of this net worth update. Specifically, the Solo 401(k).

Is there really any other gif to use in this context? I think not.

Yes, dear readers, I finally got my Solo 401(k) opened with E*TRADE. It took two phone calls to their Retirement Specialist (HALP) line, but what finally got the job done was using their online file upload. Which is, apparently, a thing they have. But not a thing they tell you about on the application. Possibly because you have to already be an E*TRADE customer in order to use it, which thankfully, I was. [Shout out to their Complete Savings Account, which I opened to get a bonus like 10 years ago!]

Once I submitted my paperwork electronically, the account was opened for me, no joke, the very next day. And I was able to make my first contribution immediately, especially since all of my banking info was already set up from the aforementioned Complete Savings Account. And someone on the internet once said I shouldn’t keep random fee-free savings accounts open with just $5 in them! HA! I sure showed that guy-or-gal-but-let’s-face-it-that-was-probably-a-dude!

And with that (with minutes left on the November clock, because that’s how I roll), I transferred in all the cash I’ve been sitting on since I started dragging my feet on this Solo 401(k) thing (*cough*August*cough*), driving my retirement balance up, and simultaneously driving my tax liability (which I track under “Other Liabilities”) down, because traditional 401(k) contributions lower that tax burden, folks.

Okay, now we're starting to develop a certain drinking theme in this post. And I'm okay with that.

Milestone Progress – Goooooooooaaaaaaaaallllllllllll!

So needless to say, I hit my goal this month – a whole two months early!

As a refresher, the goal was a total net worth of $61,099 by January 2018. That number comes from adding $100,000 to my lowest-ever net worth number of -$38,901 in September 2009. So in just a little over 8 years, I’ve made $100,000 in progress.

Tom knows what's up.

They say the first $100,000 is the hardest, so… hard part over! Phew. All done. Smooth sailing from here on out, right? Right…?

Hey, can we break out the West Wing gif now?

We can always break out the West WIng gif

That’s right, what’s next?

  • $100,000 in straight up assets. This one isn’t far off – less than $1600 away. Hardly counts as a milestone, but we can give it a gif next month or so when we hit it, all the same.
  • $70,635 net worth. Also not too far off, and sort of arbitrary – this represents $100,000 in progress since the start of this blog in January 2007. Yes, I backtracked for 2 years (student loooooans, my friends). But anyway, not a huge milestone, but possibly gif-able.
  • $100,000 net worth. Oooo now that’s a nice round number. If I could maintain this year’s rate of growth (which doesn’t seem remotely possible, but hey, you never know), I’d hit it sometime in early 2019. Supremely gif-able.

So let’s go all ahead full (that’s a thing people say, right? I got it from Titanic so it must be a real thing, because that movie is super legit), and charge at these milestones like… oh, right, the Titanic going all ahead full towards an iceberg is maybe not the metaphor I want here. You know what? Patton, why don’t you play us out here, cause this goose is cooked.

Let's rock and roll.

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!

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