Monthly Net Worth Checkpoint: December (yep – lower still)
We recently (at least it seems like it was recent) celebrated Thanksgiving and now we’re into the hustle and bustle of the Christmas season. Christmas shopping, Christmas cards, Christmas programs for the kids (my daughter had one Sunday, another tonight, a play next Friday, and my son has a play next Thursday) and so on and so forth. It is also time to check all our account balances and update our net worth for the month. Check out this page if you want to see the spreadsheet I use to track it and a video tutorial on how to create and update it . This post mentions some online tools for tracking your net worth .
Our assets dropped 1.6%
Just like last month, I expected our assets to drop more than they did. At least for that month, the rate of descent of our assets has slowed. The biggest mover was my stock options which have dropped another 14.5%. Since August, they have dropped a total of 85%! (wow, that’s a lot). The other accounts, even those with stock market exposure, did not drop a tremendous amount. Our retirement accounts only dropped 2.3% and our taxable investments dropped less than one half of a percent (How crazy is that losing 2.3% of your retirement account value in one month is not that bad anymore!?!). In fact, my daughter’s 529b plan actually increased almost 4%! It was a tepid month for all accounts, I think, as even our liquid accounts, which were increasing over the past few month, only grew by a little over 1%.
Our liabilities decreased by 0.5%
Our liabilities dropped the typical monthly rate of about 0.5%. I’d love to get rid of that mortgage payment…but the principal balance is so high that I can’t foresee doing anything about it in the near future. I’m still thinking about it though. Usually I would say every little bit helps, but when throwing a little extra cash at it each month wouldn’t reduce the length of the loan significantly, is it really worth it?
Our net worth decreased approximately 3.6%.
Well, we’ve experienced another drop in net worth this month (that’s starting to become a habit). At least the downward rate has decreased again this month (last month it was a 4.5% drop) Most of this is out of my control still (stock market losses and house valuation declines), so I try to focus on what I can control, which is mainly the liquid savings and liabilities. So, since our liquid savings were up slightly and our liabilities were down slightly, that’s good news from my perspective. Of course, Christmas brings with it a lot of extra expenses (gifts, travel, food, etc) so it will be interesting to see how we end up 2008 (of course, if you use a credit card for some expenses, then you don’t really get hit until January)
Merry Christmas!!
Related Posts:- Monthly Net Worth Update – December 2009...
- Monthly Net Worth Update – August 2009 – New Net Worth High...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
If you found this post informative or entertaining (or both), please subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email to receive future Borrow From None posts.
Thank you for visiting!
Comments
2 Responses to “Monthly Net Worth Checkpoint: December (yep – lower still)”
Leave a Reply
Subscribe to Borrow From None
Affiliates
-
Social Networking
Links of Interest
What is RSS?
Comparatively speaking you still have a lot to be grateful for! Happy Holiday!
@JW – I most definitely have a ton for which to be grateful! Even though our net worth is lower than it was at the middle of the year, I feel like we’re in a lot better shape now since we got rid of all our debt except for the mortgage. Happy New Year!