Dr. SoS both have September birthdays. Her birthday was at the beginning of last month and mine near the end of last month. She managed to get me the only thing that I really wanted for my birthday. My wish was to swim from our dock to the dam at the other end of the lake and back.
Besides swimming, we are still saving. Let’s take a look at our net worth update.
Monthly Net Worth Update
Assets
We are up a total of $1,653.78 for the month. This would have been higher, but Kelly Blue Book showed a huge drop in what we could get for our cars. Let’s dive deeper.
Cash Savings
We are finally recovering from using all our savings to pay off our Home Equity Line of Credit last May. Our emergency fund is up to $5,733.50 and we are well on our way back up to $10,000, which was my goal for the year. I am also not having to move money around as much to cover paying off our credit cards each week.
Cash Back/Gift Cards
Admittedly, we spent more money this past month and the $109.02 increase in our cash back shows. We plan to use our annual Xmas restaurant gift card for our anniversary in October, so this category will show less of an increase next month. I may even take what accumulated cash back I can and put in savings.
Cryptocurrency
Our cryptocurrency was up slightly near the end of the month. We are still a far cry from our initial speculative investment.
Retirement
The markets were up a little at the end of the month. Our accounts were up 0.20% with the $1,261.85 that we contributed. Our focus right now is saving for our emergency fund and paying off our final three debts. This category will see some action once the recession hits.
House
We nearly put an offer on another house last month. We even went so far as to obtain a prequalification from three banks. In the end, we decided we did not want to stretch ourselves by purchasing a house for nearly $100,000 more than our current house. Instead, we are going to continue working on making our house even better. Dr. SoS wants to start by purchasing a new garage door within the next month or two.
Cars and Boat
As I mentioned earlier, Kelly Blue Book was not kind to us. They dropped the value of our cars by $875. My car dropped by $500 and Dr. SoS’s car dropped by $375. Automakers just released their 2020 models. A friend of mine speculated that this caused the drop. If this is true, the value of our cars should increase slightly next spring. Hopefully, automakers will get away from annual release models and join the Tesla release schedule of continually improving their cars. I speculate this would reduce drastic drops in used car values. The good news is that NADA Guides did not decrease the value of our boat.
Liabilities
We paid off $2,968.97 in debt last month, bringing our total liabilities down to a new low of $382,019.69. This means that we get to mark a line on our Debt Free Chart and remove some marbles from our Death to Debt Skull!
Credit Cards
We had a few charges right at the end of the month, which came to $22.02, which I was unable to pay off due to Citibank not allowing me to pay off pending charges. As of today, we are back to $0 for our credit cards, though. This is interesting, when we went through the prequalification for our home loan, they told us they were going to include $25 per month for two of our credit cards because the latest balance shown on our credit report had a minimum amount due of $25. This may be important to know when you are applying for a home loan.
Keep your credit cards fully paid off on a regular basis so the minimum payment does not deduct from your available credit. That said, whatever minimal amount it is, should not affect what you could afford or you are buying a house you should not be buying.
Car Loan
We are down to only 15 more $600 payments to pay off my car. Car loans affect your available credit. One more reason to not take out car loans and to pay cash for your car.
Mortgage
We have 110 payments or 9 years 2 months remaining to pay off $167,050.61. We paid an additional $3.40 since last month.
Student Loans
We have 281 more payments on this loan if we stick to the current payment plan. We owe $205,946.06 only making a $513.89 dent in this massive debt. The crazy thing is that we paid $547.96 in interest. Such is the depressing aspect of massive student loan debt.
Summary
As of the first day of October 2019, we have a new net worth high of $602,652.75! My prediction from last month came true and we broke $600K! This is up 0.77% from our net worth of $598,030.00, and up 34.86% from our net worth of $446,864.26, from the first of October 2018. Our current net worth puts us in the top 28% at 219/787 bloggers on the Rockstar Finance Directory Net Worth Tracker.
We compile this information each month to keep us accountable and to hopefully inspire others to spend less than they make, save more, and make wise investment choices. If you have any comments or questions, please leave a comment or contact us directly.
Thank you for reading!
Mr. SoS
Talking about garage doors, we had to change the door opener and the mechanism (torsion) for our garage door last month. $900 expense.
We did that last year. It is a large expense and typically when yours goes out a necessary one. Our springs were worn out and it was nearly just as expensive to just replace the springs as it was to replace the entire unit.