Poorer Than You

Money: It's Not Just For Rich People

Net Worth Update: August 2019

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Last month was busy, and this month really didn’t let up… at all. It’s all been a big lead up to this coming week: back to school for my kiddo and FinCon for me! FinCon, the financial media conference, is now an annual thing for me (or at least it will be, after this coming week). Last year I had the pleasure of attending during my birthday, but the dates move around a little every year, so I’m not the birthday girl this time. But, it is happening in my area (Washington, DC!), so at least I don’t have to fly in!

We’ll see how FinCon affects my numbers next month (mostly, the effect will be from missed work at my day job), but for this month, let’s see how things turned out:

Change: ($3,893) | -3.18%

August Net Worth TOTAL: $118,700

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

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

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

The net worth is for me alone, though I am married. My husband and I maintain “separate but combined” finances, especially for the purposes of what’s shared on the internets. What you see here are the totals of all of the accounts that are in my name only, plus one half of joint accounts. (Debts are all in my name because my husband would rather eat his socks than take on debt. Not anymore! The credit card for his dental work is in his name and I’m counting them toward his net worth. But also, the savings to eventually pay the card off is 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: -$1,694

Oof, that stings a little. Not that I’m opposed to keeping less in cash (I’m always looking for ways to offload cash into investments or otherwise earn more on it, when I can).

And actually, this isn’t as bad as it seems. This is an example of “the marriage penalty” (see above) because what really happened is I sent money off to my husband’s savings account for his braces. The good news? We filled that fund up! Yes!

So finally, next month, we can get back to aggressively investing in retirement accounts and then maybe, just maybe, after that we’ll tackle my last remaining student loan.

The other reason cash was down? I had another busy month and I did almost nothing extra in terms of credit card opening bonuses, or bank account bonuses, or anything at all really outside of my day job (and my volunteering, which was super heavy this month, but obviously doesn’t help with cash!). No regrets, it was a month well-spent, but that’s the reason.

Retirement: -$2,459

Okay, this is the bad one (sorta). The only way I ever know that the stock market is heading down before I do these net worth posts is the rumblings I hear in Facebook groups and on Twitter. That’s because I don’t look at my investments outside of writing these posts monthly! It’s a lot better for my psyche.

Anyway, stocks are down it would seem, since my accounts are down 2% (2.00% exactly, how nice!) despite my usual Health Savings Account contributions in this category. Ah well, as usual I’m not too broken up about it. In fact, if it stays “down” like this, it’s actually good timing for me, since we will be contributing to retirement accounts again come this month. Buying on sale!

Cars: -$14

Though honestly I think Kelley Blue Book is wrong about this one. I took my old sun-burned-on Ghostbusters sticker off and added some fresh Pokémon stickers for my anniversary the other day, so my car is worth far more now, I think.

Other Assets: -$16

I wrangled another bit of cash out of my Lending Club account and we’re really into the home stretch now of clearing it out! There was actually a defaulted loan recovered this month, so I got a bit more than $16 out of it. Yay!

Student Loans: -$74

Minimum payment, same-old same-old. Though as I noted above in cash, if we can get my Traditional IRA maxed out, the student loan should be next on the chopping block, so maybe we’ll see some movement on this one toward the end of the year!

Credit Card: -$52

This is actually a little less than the minimum payment because I put some charges on the card (at 0%). There was a Shutterfly promo to get cash back on this card, so I ordered anniversary presents using a gift card from rewards from a different credit card and a combo of online discounts, I only put $20 on this card, and got $5 cash back, plus $0.71 from Rakuten. I also used the rewards on this card to place an Amazon order for my new phone, which required that I put another $5 or so on this card, too (I know, big spender this month!). So yes, there were like $20 in new charges on the card. Somehow, I’ll live!

Other Debts: -$163

My biannual hosting bill for this website came due and I paid it! I account for 1/24th of the cost as a part of my business “debt” every month, and then it gets written off when the charge goes through and I reimburse myself from the business account. Might seem silly, but it means that I’m never caught off guard when the hosting bill comes every 2 years!

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. I don’t really get it, as it also said that last month, and for the past 3 months I have not done that, but somehow I’m still on track? And even though I put that extra $20 of charges on the credit card? Ah, well, I assume it’s just going to be a little wonky until I get to the end of the year and start actually (hopefully) paying off extra from the student loan.

$200,000 in Retirement Accounts: Alright, we’re a bit further out from this one again. So, I now need $1,659 per month, minus HSA ($583) and IRA ($500) contributions, that’s $576 needed in stock market growth per month over the next 48 months. A lot of people “predicting” there will be a recession in that time, so… I guess we’ll just have to see!

Okay, so the numbers are down but there really isn’t anything all that “bad” going on this month. Mostly, it’s just annoying that I seem to be taking one step forward and then one step back all the time. Still, the overall trend is up! I’ll keep working it, as I always do.

I run these numbers by hand in a spreadsheet (though I’m in the process of switching to Tiller Money!), 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.

No matter what, let me know how you did this month! Did you weather this stock market “storm” alright, or are you a little worse for the wear on the rocky market seas?

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: December 2018

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Happy New Year! The December net worth update is usually my favorite of the year, since it concludes not just another month, but of course the calendar year, as well. But, um, well… have you heard about the stock market this month? I had heard rumblings that things were down by quite a bit, but I don’t check my investments more often than once a month. So, I’m just seeing what all the fuss was about right now…

Change: ($5,041) or -5.32%

December Net Worth TOTAL: $89,711

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

Ugggggggggh! It really is that bad, isn’t it?

Ah, well. It truly doesn’t bother me that much.

Shrug

After all, the market is out of my control. It’s not like I did anything wrong to tank my net worth by over $5k in one month. It just is what it is. And besides, we’ll be making our yearly retirement account contributions into our IRAs soon (would have liked to have done it sooner, but it’s, well, been quite a year). That means buying at this lower price, which isn’t a bad thing at all. Stock sale!

To the nitty gritty!

Cash: +$1,147

Nice. Worked a lot of overtime this month, though a big chunk of that won’t show up until next month, because it was in the last paycheck that hasn’t hit yet. But still, able to beef up cash a bit by working pretty much around the clock.

Cash

Cash will be the name of the game again as we continue to work on how we’re going to pay for $10,000 – $17,000 in dental work without raiding our savings. In that vein, a small amount of this cash increase is from selling some things on eBay. It’s sad to purge old video games in particular (especially the ones that used to help us raise money for charity), but we gotta do what we gotta do.

Retirement: -$7,151

Cameron, Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Alright, who left Cameron in charge of the stock market?

Down more than $7k, despite the fact that I was contributing. Despite the fact that I made an extra $50 contribution into the HSA, because the IRS jerked the limit around during the year. All a drop in the bucket compared to whatever the heckin happened this month.

I don’t actually know what’s going on with the stock market. Partially, because I’m disengaged from nearly all media while parenting a small child and working so much. But also, because no one ever really knows until they have the benefit of hindsight… any news right now would just be speculating. And, it doesn’t really effect me, personally. I will continue to contribute, and in doing so, purchasing stocks that are at a discount compared to a month earlier.

Cars: +$18

No explanation, but I like that it actually gained value this month. Good car!

Dwayne Johnson - Nice

Other Assets: -$84

Well, sort of. The return that was pending last month actually got credited to cash. So that blip is done now. Weee!

Student Loans: -$1,050

Woo! That $1,000 payment I sent to pay off my Unsubsidized student loan hit, and here we are. Well, that plus my regular payment to the other loan. But the Unsubsidized loan is goooooooone!

Amy Poehler "You are dead to me."

Credit Card: -$112

Okay, so the Unsubsidized student loan isn’t really dead. It lives on in this 0% interest credit card debt.

Eh, close enough.

Other Debts: +$133

Taxes for self employment, as well as insurance premium future payments, continue to grow. As they do.

Milestone Progress

The Milestone: $100,000 net worth. I was hopeful, for a long while now, that I would hit this by, well, now.

Star Trek TNG: Missed the joke.

Instead, I’ve been pushed back to right around where I was in June/July of this year. Which is not so bad, really. It’s not where I wanted to be, but I haven’t actually lost any ground. (Hint: you don’t actually lose money in the stock market unless you sell when you’re down, and I haven’t sold anything.) I still own the same number of shares that I bought, and things will just keep keeping on.

The Milestone: Paid off Unsubsidized Stafford student loan. ACCOMPLISHED!

Pingu - Finished.

And thus why we get gifs in this post!

Now, someone somewhere will have been paying enough attention to say that this doesn’t really count because the 0% interest credit card debt that I refinanced the loan to still exists. But, so does the cash to pay that off, all allocated to that very purpose. So, I’ll take the win in 2018, thank you very much.

How did your net worth do in 2018? You can run the numbers by hand with a spreadsheet like me, or you can check out Personal Capital for some automagical tracking. You and I each get a $20 gift card if you sign up through me and then link at least one valid investment account. (My referrals go to paying for my dental work. Well, paying for other stuff so my cash can go to the dental work. As you do.)

Time Travel

Net Worth Update: October 2018

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This update is several days behind because I literally jetted out of town for several days the morning of the 1st (to attend Cents Positive, the first ever women’s financial independence retreat!). Then I came back to a busy work schedule that someone (read: me) also tried to pack with doctor and dentist appointments for myself and my fam. And I’ve been working on my brand-spanking-new website, The Middletons, the whole time. Oh, and my favorite yearly round-the-clock week-long charity fundraiser, Desert Bus for Hope, started the other day, too.

So lest you thought I had up and disappeared because I didn’t want to write a definitely bad news bears net worth update, nope, that’s not it at all. (I’m just way overbooked this month.) But, you would have been right about the bad news. Because people, it is baaaad:

Change: -$6,155 or -6.20%

October Net Worth TOTAL: $93,122

October 2018 Net Worth Chart | Poorer Than YouOctober 2018 Net Worth Breakdown | Poorer Than You

Oh how the mildly mighty have fallen!! From a high of $99,824 just two months ago, down to $93,122 now. Alright, let’s talk this through:

Cash: +$353

Not amazing, but at least it wasn’t down again this month. Medical costs have continued to pile on, because of my brilliant idea of “schedule ALL the doctors’ appointments now that we’ve hit our deductible!” Not that I was wrong to do that, mind you, it’s just that hitting our deductible doesn’t mean everything is free now. We’ve still got copays on the medical stuff, and the dental and vision stuff is unaffected by the medical deductible.

Schedule all the doctors' appointments! Original meme image from Hyperbole and a Half
Me last month
All the doctors' appointments? Original meme image from Hyperbole and a Half
Me last month but like 10 minutes later

Now, this warrants a bit of an aside to talk about, because going to all these appointments has already shown that it will have far-reaching effects on my net worth updates. My husband and I both got prescriptions for glasses (my first! I’ll have glasses now! this is a new thing for me!), and both were told by the dentist that we’ll need braces. In my case, I need them very badly, very urgently, and I won’t be able to do Invisalign or anything, I need the funtimes metal ones. The good news is that our trips to the dermatologist revealed no issues, so we’ve got that going for us.

All told, the estimates for everything that’s coming out of these visits will be… somewhere in the region of $6,000 – $10,000 worth of work we need (not including the copays!). That number will ultimately depend on whether we can use something like Invisalign for my husband’s needs and whether we can negotiate down the costs of my dental work. It’s still a lot of money even if we can keep it down on the $6,000 end, though.

Now, perhaps “Cash” is not the right place to talk about this. Yes, for now we’re cash-flowing (paying out of pocket) the expenses as they come. But in reality, these are more like debts that we’ve been carrying around and not acknowledging here. Especially my dental work: it’s like a debt that I’ve been carrying around in my mouth knowingly, and yet ostriching my head in the sand about it at the same time.

We’ll see how it goes, but really… chickens have just come home to roost, and it is what it is. Hopefully taking care of all this ASAP will save us money on health care over the long run, so maybe this actually belongs in “Retirement,” where the bulk of our Health Savings Account savings are.

No matter where in this update I should have talked about it, it’s happening. Yay? At least glasses will help me to further look like a total nerd, so that people will stop mistaking me for anything but. (Seriously, that’s a real problem I have in my life. Perhaps this way, no one will ever ask me about a sportball again.)

Retirement: -$6,692

It’s the markets. I made my regular contributions, and the markets just went nuts. It doesn’t bother me—other than in the AW DANG YOU COULDN’T HAVE WAITED UNTIL *AFTER* I HIT $100K?!? sense.

As always, the markets taking a little dip actually works in my favor, since I’m buying stocks right now and this just means they are on sale. It’s annoying when tallying up the numbers, but it’s ultimately better than paying the peak price. *shrug*

Cars: -$107

Aw, come on car, why couldn’t you have an up month with your nonsensical value changes? Why you gotta pile on with the downward trend? If all the other categories jumped off a bridge, would you do it too? Actually, don’t answer that, car. You’re the only car we’ve got, please don’t get any bridge jumping ideas.

Other Assets: -$44

I cashed a $50 birthday check, and then my Lending Club balance… went up by $6? Alright. Cool.

Student Loans: -$150

Oh! Here’s a thing I did. I was playing around with my debt payoff table on Undebt.it, and I noticed that there was an extra $170.59 payment to be made to my unsubsidized student loan after my 0% credit card is paid off. You can see it in this screenshot that I shared in the August net worth update:

Debt Snowball Master Payoff Plan from Undebt.it | PoorerThanYou
What my debt payoff plan looked like before I started messing with it last month.

See how there’s a weird extra payment on the unsubsidized (middle) loan after the credit card (first) is paid off? The asymmetry of that was bothering me. So, I divided that $170.59 by the remaining months (result: $21.16), and upped my student loan payment by that amount. Because I know I can probably come up with another ~$20/month, and the awesomeness of paying off the entire unsubsidized student loan in one month (because remember, that’s where the credit card debt came from!) is going to feel amazing. I’m not going to want to wait an extra month to really pay that sucker off, so… I won’t.

Bonus: by adding that $21.16/month to my debt payoff plan, my ultimate debt free date moved up by 3 months—it’s now predicted for September 2022. Which I think is super fitting, since September is the anniversary month of when I got into debt (wee student loans!), and September 2009 was my lowest net worth ever, and generally, stuff tends to just happen in September. So why not get debt free in a September?

Credit Card: -$125

Nothing new to report.

Other Debts: -$60

So, the good news about spending a bunch of money on attending conferences and launching a new website is… your business tax burden goes down!

That’s it for the category-by-category breakdown. TL;DR – the markets were bad and I need thousands of dollars of dental work. Yay!

Milestone Progress

The Milestone: $100,000 net worth. Only 3 months left to get there by the end of the year, but I’m further away from it now than I was last month or the month before. If I can manage $2292.67 of growth each month, I can get there… which isn’t impossible. But it may largely depend on what the markets do, which is entirely out of my control. Oh well. I will get there eventually.

The Milestone: Paid off Unsubsidized Stafford student loan. I talked about this above in the “student loan” section, but in case you skipped past that, I’m sending an extra $21.16/month to this as of this month, and that will accelerate my payoff of this loan by one month, and my eventual total debt freedom by three months. Wee!

No bonus celebrating someone else’s net worth milestone this month… I honestly didn’t see anyone celebrating, since the markets hit everyone pretty hard, and I was traveling. If you did celebrate a milestone this month or last, let me know in the comments below!

Don’t know where you’re at with your money to be able to tell me? Tracking your net worth month to month is the best way to find out! You can do it by hand with a spreadsheet like I do, or you can check out Personal Capital for some automagical tracking. You and I each get a $20 gift card if you sign up through me and then link at least one valid investment account.

Time Travel

Net Worth Update: September 2018 (#FinCon18 Edition)

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I just got back from FinCon (the financial media conference, where money nerds like myself go to meet up with fellow bloggers, podcasters, vloggers, freelancers, companies, and—most importantly—old friends). And I do mean just—I’m writing this paragraph on the Metro platform, navigating my way home from the airport.

I wanted to write an intro before I got home and ran my numbers for the net worth entry below. Because one of my key takeaways from #FinCon18 (which was my first FinCon ever, believe it or not) was that there is something way more important than numbers: the amazing community of people who support each other in building financially healthy lives.

Check out the picture below. It’s blurry and dark, which is honestly not a bad thing, considering several of the people are anonymous bloggers that would have needed to have been blurred out anyway. Here are a bunch of us that went out on the very first night of FinCon, to celebrate my 32nd birthday. Of the 23 people here, 16 had never met me before in person, though they’ve all known me on the internet for varying lengths of time (from a few months to more than ten years, in the case of the two bloggers from “the before times” that were in the bunch).

#FinCon18 - Crowd gathered around the table for Stephonee's birthday
That’s me, in blue at the head of the table, getting ready to take down a chocolate piñata with 22 of my friends from the internet!

I mention this because it was abundantly clear, even at this conference dedicated to talking about finances, that money takes a big ol’ backseat to community and relationships. That can be hard to remember when running the numbers for say… a net worth update blog post where I may or may not hit the $100,000 milestone. But it’s always there, and nothing brings that to the forefront quite like connecting with old friends and new ones over smashed bits of piñata and churro.

But on the other hand… LET’S SEE THOSE NUMBERS!

Change: -$547 or -0.55%

September Net Worth TOTAL: $99,277

September 2018 Net Worth Chart | Poorer Than You September 2018 Net Worth Breakdown | Poorer Than YouWhomp whomp whomp whhhhhhhhhaaaamp.

Okay, okay, it’s not that bad. It’s basically flat. But I did not, as I had hoped I would, hit the coveted “$100k in net worth” milestone this month. And here’s why:

Cash: -$2,117

Ugh. You might be tempted to think that I spent all of that cash on the chocolate piñatas at FinCon, but no, those were only $20 each and I did not buy 100 of them. In fact, FinCon really had a negligible effect on the cash flow this month (though the missed hours of work will be showing up in October’s first paycheck).

The explanation here is actually pretty simple. Over the course of September:

  • We received a pile of medical bills. Having a toddler means going to the emergency room. Yay?
  • We fought off illness brought on by an active, socializing toddler. We missed some work because of sick days.

That’s it, really. We were sick or had doctor-y things to do, and it cost us a lot of cash this month. Discouraging, but not the end of the world. In fact, we hit our health insurance deductible this month, so now it’s time to SCHEDULE ALL THE DOCTORS’ APPOINTMENTS!

Schedule all the doctors' appointments! Original meme image from Hyperbole and a Half

Everything Else

Normally I’d break out the rest of the net worth update by category, but there’s barely anything of interest going on there. I think we can do a few quick bullet points and then just move on:

  • Retirement: normal contributions to HSA and a little bit of growth
  • Car: I have no idea why this keeps going up in value. Camrys be hot right now?
  • Other Assets: I got a birthday check that I haven’t deposited yet
  • Student Loans: regular minimum payment + 3¢
  • Credit Card: (refinanced student loan) regular minimum payment
  • Other Debts: my tax liability for my business actually went down thanks to FinCon spending

Milestone Progress

The Milestone: $100,000 net worth. We already know I didn’t hit it this month. A few hundred per month until the end of the year would get me there, but I’m kinda hoping to knock it out in one fell swoop in October, even with the lower paycheck from FinCon. LET’S DO THIS.

The Milestone: Paid off Unsubsidized Stafford student loan. I’ve got $1,217.78 left on this bad boy. And I even have my student loan payments set up so that any extra I pay automatically goes toward paying this one off. But, I’m not really sending any extra to it right now (well, $0.03/month extra, because rounding). Besides focusing on the above milestone more than this one, I’m also big on maxing out all of my available retirement contribution “space” before tackling my student loans. Still, I’m tempted to throw a little extra at it next month, just to speed things up. Maybe instead of $0.03 extra (what I’m doing every month now, yay rounding!) I’ll do $1.03 extra next month? Whoa, look out debt, I’m coming for you!

Bonus: Carmen from Make Real Cents is DEBT FREE!

I had the pleasure and the privilege of spending my first afternoon at #FinCon18 with Carmen from Make Real Cents during the FinX event we both participated in. (An eye-opening experience that I am definitely preparing a blog post all about.) At that time, Carmen was only two days away from sending in her very last debt payment. And so now, as of the end of September, she is officially DEBT FREE!

Her “back to school” debt freedom photo shoot is even more adorable than I imagined! Look at that happy debt-free face and that shiny sign!

Congrats Carmen! It’ll be a while before I join you in debt freedom, but I’m so glad to see that you got there. 😀

And you, dear reader? Have you paid off debt or celebrated another net worth milestone recently? Leave a comment below to let me know, and you could be featured next month!

Don’t know where you’re at with your money to be able to celebrate? Tracking your net worth month to month is the best way to find out! You can do it by hand with a spreadsheet like I do, or you can check out Personal Capital for some automagical tracking. You and I each get a $20 gift card if you sign up through me and then link at least one valid investment account.

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