Monthly Net Worth Checkup: January 2009
Wow…just like that Christmas ends, West Virginia wins a fourth bowl game in a row (Congrats to Pat White), the New Year’s ball drops, and 2008 is history. That means it is time to check the net worth again. This will be the last one for 2008 (or the first one for 2009 – depending how you look at it). That reminds me, I’ll need to do a check on how our net worth performed over the entire year that was 2008 – I’ll get to that in another post. Well, let’s get to checking the results for December! 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 or this post for some online tools for tracking your net worth .
Our assets rose 0.1%
Woohoo – for the first time in 5 months, our assets actually increased! Ok, sure, not by very much, but even a little bit of an increase is good (and much better than the seemingly commonplace decreases we’ve been experiencing!). Actually, this number takes into account all of our goods, including our house value as estimated by zillow.com . Throwing out the fact that zillow says that our house value dropped 2.4% this month, we’d have a fairly respectable increase in assets.
In fact, except for our home value estimate, all of our individual asset classes increased this month. Even my stock options increased a bit! Again, this is why I break it out as I do. If I just look at the top number, I don’t see much useful information. Looking at each individual class, however, allows me to discern that we’re moving in the right direction except for the home value estimate that dragged the overall number down.
Our liabilities decreased by 0.5%
Our liabilities dropped the typical monthly rate of about 0.5% – again. Of course, any bit lower is good…but I’d really like to make that mortgage drop faster! I have started to consider refinancing the mortgage – ideally into a shorter term. (Actually, I’m going to do a couple posts on that topic in the near future).
Our net worth increased 1.2%.
Up 1.2% – I will certainly take it after the last few months! What will be most interesting to see, of course, is whether this upward trend will continue or if we return to our downward march. The economy still seems to be in a pretty rough patch with forecasts of this recession stretching possibly years. On the other hand, we don’t have too much debt and I’ve been trying to increase the amount of money we save and invest each month, so hopefully we can start building our reserves and racking some long-term savings up.
In fact, I recently upped my 401k contributions and opened a 529 plan for my son. I’m also considering upping my wife’s 401k contribution and investing more or prepaying the mortgage. Where will I get all this extra money to do this, you ask? Ahh, don’t bother me with such details…I just try to be aggressive in how much I save and invest and if the checking account balance is not dropping too close to $0, then I guess we’re ok! (Yeah, I know, I really need to update our budget!) Actually, I do think that is a valid strategy – save first and save aggressively to see if you can make it work. You can always back off if you can’t balance the budget…but if you never try the extra savings, I can pretty much guarantee it will disappear to some other pursuit never to be seen again!
Happy New Year!
Related Posts:- Monthly Net Worth Update – August 2009 – New Net Worth High...
- Monthly Net Worth Update – September 2009...
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