It’s time for my monthly Reinvermogen update (Google tells me that means Net Worth in German). We had a pretty stellar month, thanks to you guys/gals. PDITF brought home a little over $1,000 in March. Before you go thinkin’ this is a cash cow, keep in mind I made $0 last month. My blog’s income is about as consistent as Charlie Sheen’s sanity. Here’s the breakdown…
Assets:
Checking Account: $8,713; +$4,343. I haven’t been too concerned with moving money around much while I’ve been in Germany. I also have a whopper of a Credit Card bill due this month (see below), so I need to keep cash easily accessible to pay that sucker in full. You should pay your CC in full too…just sayin’.
Savings Accounts: $27,685; +3,029. Managed to sneak another $3,000 in to savings this month. Shhh, don’t tell Girl Ninja. Just kidding, she’s the only reason we are able to save every month! Dual income kicks major pirate booty.
Roth IRA: $22,866; +$617. I wish I could say I had some crazy awesome investment secrets, but in reality my retirement strategy is quite lame. Buy and hold baby, buy and hold. I’m rockin’ three different Vanguard mutual funds just as hard as I rocked bleached tips in high school. Anyone else bleach their tips!?
TSP (401K): $23,340; +$1,022. 5% of my gross pay invested + 5% matched by employer = Consistent growth in my retirement fund. If you aren’t contributing to your retirement you better check your priorities. I don’t want to have to support you when you’re old and wrinkly 🙂
Liabilities:
Student Loan: $0. Next month will mark my one year debt free anniversary. Do you think I should remove this section from my liabilities, or keep reminding myself I punched Sallie Mae in the face?
Credit Card: $3,371. Oh man. This behemoth makes my heart hurt. Moving, flying Girl Ninja to Germany, and buying a bag of crack adds up quick. I plan to pay this sucker in full just like every other month. Who wants to pay 19% interest when you can pay 0%? Answer: Crazy people.
In all we managed to move up another $6,095 since last month. That puts our total Net Worth at $78,233 (this time last year, it was $37,894). This was one of the biggest gains we’ve seen. Hopefully we can keep the upward trend going. Hoping to hit that $100,000 mark before years end. Thinkin’ about taking up a side job as an underwater basket weaver to bring home a little more moolah. What would your unrealistic side hustle be?
p.s. you can see all of my net worth updates here.
**I chose not to include ‘possessions’ (including our cars) in our NW calculations, which would probably increase our worth by about $15,000.**
I really think you should keep the school loans in your liabilities. #1 It is a HUGE accomplishment that I find very inspirational and #2 New readers who are just glancing through would probably just think you’ve never had a drop of debt in your life because you are so responsible.
Maybe you could make another recap section In your monthly rundown for all your Punched Debts and list everything you’ve paid off there together.
Every month I read your net worth update, I feel a stronger urge to marry a woman with a job and no debt.
That chick reminds me of someone from Mortal Kombat, but I can’t remember who….. Anyway, your credit card bill reminds me of mine! We’re about to pay of a big chunk of our student loans with our AAdvantage Mastercard (purely for the airline miles, mind you), so I will be hovering close to our limit until we pay it off next month. Eek!
Do you ever get concerned about putting the actual dollar amounts for your net worth? Are you afraid someone might force you, by gun point or otherwise, to give up some of that cash? That’s why I took the dollars off my blog… I guess I don’t trust the general public.
Austin
Fantastic gain! I hate to admit it but I did have the tips…someone should have kicked my ass! also I don’t think crack is all that expensive, just saying lol
Seriously need to get my side hustle of blogging about homebrewing going.
Congratulations! Keep it up.
Why can I never get these numbers to add up properly or how are you doing these calculations?
4,343 + 3,029 + 617 + 1,022 – 3,371 = 5,638 not 6,095
It also doesn’t help explain how according to your budget, that you are saving nearly 3 times what you have estimated ($2,062.17) … maybe it is time for you to update that so anybody new can understand where you are pulling in an extra 4k a month.
The numbers don’t add up properly because I dont account for a change in my credit card bill (notice their is no increase or decrease). Since the CC balance changes each month, it wont add up properly if you only calculate the changes. If you take the sum of each of our accounts and subtract our CC bill that is our Net Worth. I then take this months net worth and subtract it from last months net worth to indicate the overall change (in this case $6,095ish). I’m impressed you pay close enough attention to the numbers to see the difference…kudos to you 🙂
The income that I budgeted for is extremely conservative, meaning we should ALWAYS be able to save at least $2,000 each month, even in the worst of times. We’ve been averaging between $3,000 and $4,000 most months depending on how many days Girl Ninja substitute taught and how much income I earned from my blog. It should also be noted the “Left Over” section at the bottom of my budget does not account for things like 401K contributions and Roth IRA contributions which also help my NW increase each month. I think my budget fits well with our conservative estimates and is as detailed as we can get with the variables we have in our life. Would love to hear how you’d suggest changing it though. I’m always open to new ideas!
Thanks for commenting 🙂
Ever considered tracking your progress on NetworthIQ? It creates a nice visual over time.
https://www.networthiq.com/
I’m pretty sure I saw that woman on some TLC show called “My Strange Addiction”. Her addiction was, drum roll please, body building. She really wasn’t that strange though compared to the other chick they showed. She was 25 and sucked her thumb. All. The. Time.
Just wait until you have a baby ninja 🙂
The possibility to get cash on the side are endless…blogging, oh wait, I can’t be that consistently entertaining. I could write a book, but I don’t have anything to write about that no one else hasn’t written about in a better way. I could start a band, but any income playing gigs is more than offset by the gear cost…that and I’d be scared to have my employees go to a show – I never hide the fact that I’m a rocker, but there’s a difference when your admin officer is in the audience. You know, it would be great to get one of those board of directors jobs that pays like 25K to go to 6 meetings a year but it seems you need to already be rich and influential to do that.
The first $100,000 is the hardest!