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: July 2018

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Well, it finally happened. The thing that I’ve been dreading for years (and had ample time to prepare for and totally didn’t). Yes, at last, NetWorthIQ, the service I was using to track my net worth and generate the graphs for these updates, has died. Time of Death? Sometime in the last month, I dunno. On July 23rd, I got this tweet from my fellow blogger/Stephanie:

And it was at that point that I knew I was probably in trouble. Sometime, years ago, I started making backups of my NetWorthIQ data, because the site was buggy af and I knew this day would come. But, I was lax in keeping up with those backups. After all, I technically have all the data from 2008 onward in a spreadsheet, anyway. I could always just recreate the numbers from scratch and do a whole new graph! Except that sounded like a lot of work, so I never got around to doing it while NetWorthIQ was still alive (when it would have been notably easier).

And now, finally, during one of the busiest months of my entire life… it died. Because of course.

RIP NetworthIQ: Mar 1, 2005 – July 22ish, 2018

So that’s why my net worth update is a week late this month. (I know, excuses, excuses.) Because I had to rebuild my graph from scratch from numbers that I (gasp!) didn’t have in a spreadsheet. I had to cobble the numbers all together from a combination of:

But in the end, I found or calculated all 140 monthly net worth updates (including this month’s!) going back to the very first one at the end of 2006, and now I can make pretty graphs. And so, without any further complaining about all the work I made for myself ado… here is my brand-spanking-new, much-beautified net worth graph!

(Right after the numbers, anyway…)

Change: +$4,161 or +4.65%

July Net Worth TOTAL: $93,688 (aw yeah, I’m never leaving you out again, you beautiful total net worth number you)

July 2018 Net Worth Chart | Poorer Than You

July 2018 Net Worth Breakdown | Poorer Than You

Ahhhhh yes, that’s so much better, isn’t it? I cleaned out some of the garbage (there’s no way I was ever going to use the “Other Mortgage(s)” category), and customized this whole thing to my heart’s content.

But enough about the graph and chart… let’s discuss that $4,161 increase!!! What what?!?

Cash: -$1,306

For such a good month, not a great month for cash! This is the result of (surprise surprise) a clerical error on my part.

You see, I somehow ended up with 3 separate HSA accounts at some point. Each one with 2 sub accounts (a cash account and an investment account). So I was counting the cash accounts of each one as, well, Cash and the investment accounts as Retirement. Except that just like I’m a big loser who failed to back up her NetWorthIQ updates for the past 6 years, I actually failed to count the newest HSA’s investment account as Retirement. I didn’t forget about it entirely, I just had it under Cash for some dumb reason.

So I fixed that this month, and well, now it looks like Cash took a big hit and Retirement went gangbusters. And, on top of that, the last few months where I said that the gains in my Retirement accounts were due to me contributing to my HSA? No, silly Stephonee… those were actual investment gains because those contributions weren’t being counted as Retirement. Whoops! But again, now they are!

So while there was an on-paper loss, it was actually a really good month for cash. Work got crazy busy and I pulled a ton of overtime (and my husband, who works with me, lent a hand and managed to get overtime too, which is bananas when you remember that we work opposite schedules from one another and have no child care). Only one paycheck with overtime hit in July, but it was a nice bump. August should be even better, because it’s a 3-paycheck month for us, and that first paycheck was full of July’s overtimey goodness.

Of course, I say the above as I’m currently at home sick (whole family picked up some sort of bug) not earning any more overtime, so maybe August won’t be so hot in the end. Curses upon this illness!

Get Spendy With It (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)

We did get a little spendy in July too, though. I was totally not at all interested in Amazon’s Prime Day theatrics this year (or as I’ve renamed it, Instant Pot Day, which is a part of why I didn’t care because I’ve already got an Instant Pot from last year’s Prime Day, thank you). But once Amazon got their act together and stopped just giving us doggy error messages, my coworker pointed out a deal on Calphalon pans. And well, I had been not bothering to get a new skillet for literal years after our old Ikea one warped and cracked, and had to be thrown out.

Except now I see that they are offering that pan set for the same price I paid on Prime Day and I totally feel like a sucker. But a sucker who finally replaced her broken skillet, at least. And who now owns a saucier pan as well, which makes me fancy.

Along the same lines, I bought some $160 sheets this month. Mostly because they have a lifetime warranty, so just like the Calphalon pans, I’m hoping this is a “buy it for life” purchase. Except I personally think the claims that these are the “softest sheets ever” are totally overblown and that’s why I’m not linking to the sheets I bought. But if you listen to podcasts, you probably know the ones I’m talking about, because they love to sponsor podcasts with their ads (and yup, that’s totally how I ended up buying them).

And finally, we replaced my husband’s smart phone. We’ve both been happily chugging along with Republic Wireless phones (and paying less than $40/month total for service, noice), but his was an older model that lacked an expandable memory feature. He had reached the point of actually deleting photos of our child off of his phone (not to mention long ago deleting the Pokémon Go app, so he’s been missing out on the new “friends” feature in a big way) which led me to believe it might be time to shop for a new phone. Thankfully, Republic emailed me with a really sweet “Dorm Pack” deal they’re running: a brand new Moto G6 phone, a power bank, and 3 months of 3GB data, all for $199. (This deal is only going through August 10th, so if you want to be cool like my husband, you’ll have to scuttle right over to Republic’s website.)

So yes, pricey pans, pricey sheets, and a reasonably-priced smart phone on a discount plan… it was a bit of a spendy month. But other than rolling my eyes at the “softest sheets ever” and literally having not even washed the Calphalon pans yet—you know what? Let’s… let’s just move on.

Retirement: +$5,247

If you missed my explanation above, this is mostly the result of my “whoopsie!” And a bit of account growth, too. I think the most annoying part of this is how friggin close I was to $100,000 in retirement this month without actually getting there! $141 away, are you kidding me right now?

Obviously, I’ll probably hit the “$100k in Retirement” (and then some) milestone in August, unless the markets go whackadoodle. Which wouldn’t be the worst thing for me, since I’m in the “buying” phase, but ya know. It would be nice to hit it anyway. 3 paychecks in August (and thus 3 contributions to my HSA) should help that along nicely.

Car: -$210

Oh, Kelly Blue Book value. Sometimes, you’re my friend, and sometimes… you seem to remember that my car is a Toyota Camry with a dent in it. That’s fine. At least it’s fully paid for, hey-o!

Other: +$10

My LendingClub account appears to be gasping for air! Some loan that was behind on the payments probably paid up rather than going to collections. Still, I’m not impressed—there have been waaaay too many defaults on my loan notes over the years. I’m still pulling my money out of the account (slowly and lazily).

Student Loans: -$143

Still just chugging along with the minimum+3 cents (because rounding!) on this one. Things won’t get exciting here for another 10 months probably, so we’ll just stay patient.

Credit Card: -$125

A reminder that this is a 0% balance transfer from my student loan, and not a “real” credit card debt. I’ve almost got enough in cash savings to pay this off in full (should have 100% of it set aside in August!), I’m just letting it ride out the 0% promo rate.

You may notice that I haven’t fixed the minimum payment that I complained about last month… July was just not the month to be tweaking things. With all the overtime and craziness, it was more of a “survival mode” month. But I’ll eek out a few more pennies in interest later!

Other: -$152

I finally paid off that $152 loanshark loan! Just kidding. This is boring tax stuff from my bidness.

Milestone Progress

The Milestone: $100,000 net worth. Only 5 months left to get there on time! But with this month blowing up like gangbusters, I just need $1262.40 in net worth growth each month to get there by the end of the year. So, a quarter of what I pulled off this month, basically. Yup, that seems doable.

Other Milestone: $100,000 in retirement accounts. Uggggggggggggggggggh, the frustrating thing about the “gifs only when we hit the milestone” rule is that I can’t use a Get Smart “missed it by THAT much” gif right here. Just $141 short! Ah, well. In all likelihood, NEXT MONTH THERE WILL BE GIFS!!

BONUS: Zero2FIRE hit $100,000 Net Worth!

Gotta give a shoutout to my girl Zero, who was also working on a $100,000 net worth goal… and just got there!

Oh, and I’m totally going to join her in the #NetWorthStarJar movement (just as soon as I find some star-making paper that I’m happy with):

Congrats, Zero! (But also, dishonor upon your house, your family, and your cow for beating me there. Obviously.)

How about you, friend? Are you celebrating a net worth milestone that I should be jealous of? Share it in the comments below and maybe I’ll feature it next month (with the requisite dishonor upon you if you’re beating me)!

And if you’re not tracking your net worth, do eet! Do eet now! You can use a simple spreadsheet and an outdated tool that you forget to make backups of like me, or you could be smart and let Personal Capital do the tracking for you (but you should probably make backups), and get a $20 Amazon gift card in the process!

Net Worth Update: July 2017

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We’re into the real heat of summer now! I’ve pretty much sequestered myself entirely inside the air-conditioned apartment until that big burning orb in the sky goes away. Except, I did spend a week hanging out at -gasp!- the beach, which is basically a first for me. I don’t think I’d ever been to the beach more than 2 days in a row before in my entire life.

How did taking a week off to frolic in the ocean waves affect my money? Let’s have a look at this month’s numbers!

Change: +$1,363 or +2.69%

July Net Worth TOTAL: $51,949

Net Worth Graph July 2017 | Poorer Than You

Net Worth Assets and Liabilities July 2017 | Poorer Than You

Okay, so, first? I want to talk about that Retirement number. Went up by $989 – nice, right? But wait… I didn’t contribute to retirement this month! Not a red cent. We’re in a lull right now for my retirement contributions, focusing on my funding my husband’s accounts instead. So that nearly-$1000 was all gains, baby!

Except… I can’t actually get excited about that. Well, not too excited anyway. I’m in my “wealth accumulation” years, which is a fancy way of saying “I’m buying right now, not selling.” And when you’re buying something, you want the price to go down, not up! So those on paper gains may be exciting to look at, but I’m actually hoping that number will go down some, so I can buy “on sale.” Just a thought.

Vacation Spending

Cash is up this month, despite the fact that we took a week of vacation (unpaid time off). We kept our spending for the trip pretty light – the shared cost of a beach house with my parents, siblings, and their broods; we bought a round of groceries and beer for the whole group; we stopped at a McDonald’s for lunch on the way back and used a gift card (which we got from our coworkers last year as a “Congrats on the baby!” gift), and that was it for vacation expenses (well, plus a few sundries such as sunscreen, inflatable pool for the baby, adorable baby sun hat, etc.).

The real cost of the trip is in lost wages, since my husband and I both lack any paid time off benefits. That cost won’t be reflected anywhere until next month, since it affected the last paycheck of the month and we haven’t had that come through yet. But we had enough saved up in our “Time Off” savings account (our self-funded “paid time off” savings) and our “Travel” savings account to cover the lost hours. Also, I worked through the trip, which ended up being more than a little interesting when the internet at the beach house was out due to a fried modem from a lightning storm. O_O

But I survived the multi-day lack of internet and still managed to get my work done. Working on vacation isn’t exactly ideal, but if you’ve got to work, you can’t really beat doing so while sitting in a porch swing, enjoying cool ocean breezes!

The baby thought sand was awesome and waves were scary, in case you were wondering. Also, we stuffed ourselves on donuts.

Donuts are the freaking best
Don’t ask me why I cut them like this.

Vacation was the “big news” this month, but again, we won’t see the full effects of it until next month.

Milestone Progress

$51,949 out of $61,099 by January 2018, $1,525 per month to go! That seems very doable, considering the $1,363 gain during what was a “down” month (no retirement contributions and travel spending). Of course, that just makes me want to run to the finish line on this – quick, where can I get a spare $9,000 right now?

The tortoise and the hare - slow and steady does it
Yeah yeah, slow and steady, I know, I know…

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!

Net Worth Update: July 2016

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If you (or I) thought June was craaaaazy, it was nothing compared to July. At the very end of June, we found an apartment we liked and put in application to take possession of it on July 1st… and found out we’d been approved just in time to sign the lease on July 1st. We spent the month of July packing, moving, cleaning… and then we skipped town and went to Disney World. True story.

Change: +$55 or +0.18%

July Net Worth Total: $30,057

July 2016 Net Worth Graph - PoorerThanYou

Not so bad – up, but barely, closer to “flat” really. But hey, with a full apartment move to a bigger place and a Disney World vacation in the month of July? I’ll take flat. I’ll totally take flat.

Moving

So we signed the lease (obviously), packed up all of our stuff, and moved. This time around, we decided to hire both professional movers and a cleaning company instead of DIYing/bribing friends with the ol’ pizza and beer. We still had a little bit of help from my brother (who happened to have a day off work on the day of our move), but that was pretty much necessary to replace pregnant-me, who couldn’t be very helpful. (I carried some pillows I think, and packed the hanging clothes boxes, and pointed a lot to say where things should go.)

I haven’t done a good run-down yet of the total costs, but we did shop around for both services using Thumbtack.com, and that seemed to save us some good money. We’ll see when I run the math (in a future post), but Thumbtack definitely made it easier to compare different providers, so I’m pretty happy with that aspect of it.

DIDNEY WURL!

DIDNEY WURRRRLLLL - PoorerThanYou
Yup, this is us, at Walt Disney World.

With everything that’s been going on… how could we afford to just up and go to Disney World this month? Easy: saving, and travel hacking. I’ve never talked about travel hacking on this blog before, and this was my first real attempt at it (I did some very basic travel hacking back in 2014 by signing up for the Chase Sapphire Preferred credit card, which was offering a $400 sign-up bonus at the time, and putting the costs of my Ireland trip on that card to easily meet the spending amount needed to get the bonus.

But since then, I kinda forgot about the entire idea of travel hacking until my sister tried to organize a family trip to Disney World this year. There just seemed like no way we could pull together all the money for another Disney trip (husband and I went there for our honeymoon in late 2014 and dropped a good deal of cash to do so), until I remembered that travel hacking is a thing.

Again, this is the sort of thing that deserves its own post (or a whole series of posts, more likely), so I won’t dig any deeper into the topic right now, to spare anyone not interested in travel hacking. But the proof is in the pudding: we went to Disney at the end of July, and we moved to a more expensive place, and bought stuff for the new apartment, and yet… my net worth stayed steady.

Baby Stuffs

Oh right – still pregnant! We actually bought just a couple of things for our upcoming bundle of joy (read: bundle of poop and vomit, more likely – I harbor no illusions about motherhood): two “bodysuits” (Did you know that “onesie” is actually a trademarked term owned by Gerber? Just a little tidbit from my product copywriting business!), in 6-month size. Because I don’t believe in buying newborn sized stuff except a couple of plain white outfits, until I have proof that my baby will be newborn sized. And even if the kid is born small enough to need newborn-sized clothes (unlikely in my family of tall folks), most kids don’t need clothes in that size for long. So why buy the cute stuff in a size they’ll instantly outgrow?

UPickVG Baby OnesieBut aside from 2 adorable “one piece baby outfits” (including the one above, designed by a good friend for our charity fundraiser), we have still managed to not buy anything else for the bun in the oven. Hoping to keep that up until September, when we’ll be less than 2 months away from the arrival date, and the baby showers are done (so we can see what stuff we actually need).

That’s it for July – with moving and our trip, there really wasn’t time for anything else! But stay tuned, because August is already shaping up to be an interesting month. You see, we figured out something really extraordinary about my income and my upcoming maternity leave… but it won’t be relevant until we see how August all shakes out. 😀

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!

Net Worth Update: February – September 2015

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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!

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