Another increase in August which is good. It seems we are still trying to get our footing back on some solid ground after the wedding. We manage to put some cash into savings. At first glance it may look like we took a big hit in savings but that’s because we put a large lump sum payment into the mortgage. We still manage to save about $1000 this month but the biggest gains came from our investments.  Its going to hurt next month when the market does its seasonal correction.

In addition we were looking into buying out our lease at the end of the term in 6 months. However as in all things in life it quite isn’t going to work out that way and we are now looking to purchase a new vehicle. This means a big down payment and several years of financing. A car is an albatross especially when you are leasing.  September is definitely going to be a bad month for our net worth.

Savings: We currently maintain $4500 in our personal checking accounts so we don’t have to pay any banking fees. The rest in our accounts is being set aside for an emergency fund which we hope will reach $30k.

Mortgage: There is debate on how one should include their home in their net worth. Some people try and track the present value of their mortgage and others prefer to use their purchase price and leave it at that. I’m in the latter camp. I feel tracking the value of your home on a month to month basis isn’t worth while. We have no intention of selling since we need a place to live and it takes away from true net worth growth of saving and investing properly.

Line of Credit: This is a line of credit that I took out to invest in the market. This will remain the same as I will continue to only pay the interest since I’m claiming it on my taxes. I will eventually pay down the loan I just haven’t decided on when.

Vehicle: We are currently leasing our vehicle. This is preexisting to my fiance and I meeting. Our intention is to ultimately purchase the car once the lease expires. Unfortunately it looks like when all the added items tallied up the final price came out to a lot more then what we are willing to pay. We are looking to purchase a new vehicle now. We won’t be tracking its value as it is a depreciating asset and serves no purpose in helping us achieve our goals. It’s benefit comes in the way of us running this car for as long as possible allowing us to save and invest more.

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Due to my little break its been a while since I’ve posted a net worth update. I hadn’t posted an update for June or July so both will be included in this single update. As well I feel its necessary to do a midyear review to get some insight into my progress thus far.

It’s also fitting that I do this review now because we are done with the wedding. One of the biggest hindrances for us this past year has been our ability to save and grow our net worth organically. Rather then moving money over to our savings account we were keeping the money in our chequing which isn’t being tracked as part of our net worth. Now that everything is over with I hope to see our savings increase as well since the wedding has been nearly completely paid for. The only outstanding item is the final payment for the photographer which will be settled once we receive the photos.

June

In June we manage to squeeze out an increase of 1.78%. Unfortunately we had very little money go towards savings. The wedding was creeping up and money was flowing out. The only saving grace was the increase in our investment accounts. The markets continue to go up and so do the value of our investments accounts.

July

July turned out to be a better month with an increase of nearly 6%. Cash continued to flow out but we ended up on top due to the generous wedding gifts from family and friends. I wish we could continue to see savings increase in this fashion but that will most likely have to wait until after August. Like I said earlier, we have just a few more things to pay for from the wedding and the honeymoon and then we are done. July was another great month on the markets and it helps make up for all of those lows earlier in the year. I know this can’t last forever but I’ll be smart about it and enjoy these market increases while I can. July also turned out to be a 3 payment month on our mortgage. This allowed use to pay more of our principal than normal. Yah to that!

Midyear Review

Ah yes the midyear review. I’ve seen a lot of ups and downs the last 7 months and this review will help provide a clearer picture of whats happened thus far. Overall things have been good up to this point with an increase of nearly 30%. I’m happy to say that most of that was not from the amazing upswing in the market even though I had an increase of almost 55%. At first glance it may appear that we haven’t done so well on savings with only a $3800 increase. However at the beginning of the year I was hording my RRSP contributions in a savings account which was then moved over to my RRSP account in February. This pretty much means there was a big drop in savings from the beginning of the year which we had to replenish. Overall I’m happy with our progress this year but I also realize its unsustainable. All we can do is work hard and let the coins drop where they may.

Savings: We currently maintain $4500 in our personal checking accounts so we don’t have to pay any banking fees. The rest in our accounts is being set aside for an emergency fund which we hope will reach $30k.

Mortgage: There is debate on how one should include their home in their net worth. Some people try and track the present value of their mortgage and others prefer to use their purchase price and leave it at that. I’m in the latter camp. I feel tracking the value of your home on a month to month basis isn’t worth while. We have no intention of selling since we need a place to live and it takes away from true net worth growth of saving and investing properly.

Line of Credit: This is a line of credit that I took out to invest in the market. This will remain the same as I will continue to only pay the interest since I’m claiming it on my taxes. I will eventually pay down the loan I just haven’t decided on when.

Vehicle: We are currently leasing our vehicle. This is preexisting to my fiance and I meeting. Our intention is to ultimately purchase the car once the lease expires. We won’t be tracking its value as it is a depreciating asset and serves no purpose in helping us achieve our goals. It’s benefit comes in the way of us running this car for as long as possible allowing us to save and invest more.

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Well May has been another good month with an increase of 5%. The investments are doing well and we finally stopped hording so much cash and moved some into savings.  I continue to save my RRSP money in a savings account and hope to make a contribution in the next few months.  All in all everything continues to look good. We really want to get the wedding over with so our savings routine can have some normality again.

Savings: We currently maintain $4500 in our personal checking accounts so we don’t have to pay any banking fees. The rest in our accounts is being set aside for an emergency fund which we hope will reach $30k.

Mortgage: There is debate on how one should include their home in their net worth. Some people try and track the present value of their mortgage and others prefer to use their purchase price and leave it at that. I’m in the latter camp. I feel tracking the value of your home on a month to month basis isn’t worth while. We have no intention of selling since we need a place to live and it takes away from true net worth growth of saving and investing properly.

Line of Credit: This is a line of credit that I took out to invest in the market. This will remain the same as I will continue to only pay the interest since I’m claiming it on my taxes. I will eventually pay down the loan I just haven’t decided on when.

Vehicle: We are currently leasing our vehicle. This is preexisting to my fiance and I meeting. Our intention is to ultimately purchase the car once the lease expires. We won’t be tracking its value as it is a depreciating asset and serves no purpose in helping us achieve our goals. It’s benefit comes in the way of us running this car for as long as possible allowing us to save and invest morre.

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This month was another big month where we saw our net worth increase by nearly 10%. Not only did the market trend further upwards but the banks soared even further causing my investment portfolio to increase by 24%. Savings had an increase of 76% mostly from my tax return. I had a return of $8k and it will only sit in the savings account until after the wedding where it will be applied against our mortgage. Aside from that we continue to horde cash in our savings accounts that aren’t tracked in our net worth.   We are using this money as a buffer for any wedding expenses that come up. On top of that we have already spent around $5k on the honeymoon which I can’t wait to go on. Come August we’ll see a big leap in our net worth once we can finally put those cash reserves into our savings.

Savings: We currently maintain $4500 in our personal checking accounts so we don’t have to pay any banking fees. The rest in our accounts is being set aside for an emergency fund which we hope will reach $30k.

Mortgage: There is debate on how one should include their home in their net worth. Some people try and track the present value of their mortgage and others prefer to use their purchase price and leave it at that. I’m in the latter camp. I feel tracking the value of your home on a month to month basis isn’t worth while. We have no intention of selling since we need a place to live and it takes away from true net worth growth of saving and investing properly.

Line of Credit: This is a line of credit that I took out to invest in the market. This will remain the same as I will continue to only pay the interest since I’m claiming it on my taxes. I will eventually pay down the loan I just haven’t decided on when.

Vehicle: We are currently leasing our vehicle. This is preexisting to my fiance and I meeting. Our intention is to ultimately purchase the car once the lease expires. We won’t be tracking its value as it is a depreciating asset and serves no purpose in helping us achieve our goals. It’s benefit comes in the way of us running this car for as long as possible allowing us to save and invest more.

How is your net worth doing after the upswing in the market in march ?

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This month we saw nearly a 5% increase in our net worth. This was mostly brought on by the slight recovery in the market this past month. Non-registered investments increased by nearly 25% (over 6k). Unfortunately we are seeing very little organic growth via savings and debt reduction, only about $1k. We continue to horde our money in the account that we use to pay our bills (don’t worry its a high interest account) while we deal with wedding and honeymoon expenses. This account isn’t being tracked as part of our net worth because its an outflow account.

Savings: We currently maintain $4500 in our personal checking accounts so we don’t have to pay any banking fees. The rest in our accounts is being set aside for an emergency fund which we hope to reach $30k.

Mortgage: There is debate on how one should include their home in their net worth. Some people try and track the present value of their mortgage and others prefer to use their purchase price and leave it at that. I’m in the latter camp. I feel tracking the value of your home on a month to month basis isn’t worth while. We have no intention of selling since we need a place to live and it takes away from true net worth growth of saving and investing properly.

Line of Credit: This is a line of credit that I took out to invest in the market. This will remain the same as I will continue to only pay the interest since I’m claiming it on my taxes. I will eventually pay down the loan I just haven’t decided on when.

Vehicle: We are currently leasing our vehicle. This is preexisting to my fiance and I meeting. Our intention is to ultimately purchase the car once the lease expires. We won’t be tracking its value as it is a depreciating asset and serves no purpose in helping us achieve our goals. It’s benefit comes in the way of us running this car for as long as possible allowing us to save and invest more.

How is your net worth doing after the upswing in the market in march ?

-mfd-

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February Summary
We manage to squeeze out a small increase in our overall net worth. As expected savings had a huge drop off as I shifted $21k from savings over to my RRSP. As well we haven’t put any additional money into the emergency fund. The money we set aside for our emergency fund continues to sit in our Bills chequing account (which we don’t track in our net worth) because of some of the shifting of funds I needed to do to meet my $21k commitment. In the next two weeks there will be a good amount of cash moved to savings as all of our finances will have returned to their normally schedule program.

American banks continue to weigh down my portfolio. Continued fears of nationalization brought the stock prices to new lows. I still have about 20% in cash waiting for a stable point to add to my positions.

The monthly mortgage payments have been increased by 25%. Now over 50% of our payment is going towards principal.

Our current net worth:

Savings: We currently maintain $4500 in our personal checking accounts so we don’t have to pay any banking fees. The rest in our accounts is being set aside for an emergency fund which we hope to reach $30k.

Mortgage: There is debate on how one should include their home in their net worth. Some people try and track the present value of their mortgage and others prefer to use their purchase price and leave it at that. I’m in the latter camp. I feel tracking the value of your home on a month to month basis isn’t worth while. We have no intention of selling since we need a place to live and it takes away from true net worth growth of saving and investing properly.

Line of Credit: This will remain the same as I will continue to only pay the interest since I’m claiming it on my taxes. I will eventually pay down the loan I just haven’t decided on when.

Vehicle: We are currently leasing our vehicle. This is preexisting to my fiance and I meeting. Our intention is to ultimately purchase the car once the lease expires. We won’t be tracking its value as it is a depreciating asset and serves no purpose in helping us achieve our goals. It’s benefit comes in the way of us running this car for as long as possible allowing us to save and invest more.

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There was a slight decrease in our net worth at the end of the month. We manage to increase our savings (which is in fact a lump going towards my RRSP) by nearly $4k. However my investment portfolio continues to take a beating mainly because American Banks continue to take a beating. All we can do is continue to save and push forward.

Our current net worth:

Savings: We currently maintain $4500 in our personal checking accounts so we don’t have to pay any banking fees. As well a large portion is being held in savings which will then be put as a lump sum towards my RRSP contribution for 2008. The rest in our accounts is being set aside for an emergency fund.

Mortgage: There is debate on how one should include their home in their net worth. Some people try and track the present value of their mortgage and others prefer to use their purchase price and leave it at that. I’m in the latter camp. I feel tracking the value of your home on a month to month basis isn’t worth while. We have no intention of selling since we need a place to live and it takes away from true net worth growth of saving and investing properly.

Line of Credit: This will remain as I will continue to only pay the interest since I claiming it on my taxes. I will eventually pay down the loan I just haven’t decided on when.

Vehicle: We are currently leasing our vehicle. This is preexisting to my fiance and I meeting. Our intention is to ultimately purchase the car once the lease expires. We won’t be tracking its value as it is a depreciating asset and serves no purpose in helping us achieve our goals. It’s benefit comes in the way of us running this car for as long as possible allowing us to save and invest more.

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What is net worth?

Net worth is defined as all of your assest minus your all of your liabilities. To put it another way it is the total value of everything you own minus the total value of everything you owe. If you owe more than you own, you have a negative net worth. If you own more than you owe you will have a positive net worth.

Why is calculating net worth important?

Net worth is a gauge of your financial health. If you plan on setting a findependence day then you need to calculate your net worth on a regular basis. If you see a negative shift in your net worth then you can identify it quickly and resolve it before it gets out of hand like piling credit card debit.

Our current net worth:

Savings: We currently maintain $4500 in our personal checking accounts so we don’t have to pay any banking fees. As well a large portion is being held in savings which will then be put as a lump sum towards my RRSP contribution for 2008. The rest in our accounts is being set aside for an emergency fund.

Mortgage: There is debate on how one should include their home in their net worth. Some people try and track the present value of their mortgage and others prefer to use their purchase price and leave it at that. I’m in the latter camp. I feel tracking the value of your home on a month to month basis isn’t worth while. We have no intention of selling since we need a place to live and it takes away from true net worth growth of saving and investing properly.

Vehicle: We are currently leasing our vehicle. This is preexisting to my fiance and I meeting. Our intention is to ultimately purchase the car once the lease expires. We won’t be tracking its value as it is a depreciating asset and serves no purpose in helping us achieve our goals. It’s benefit comes in the way of us running this car for as long as possible allowing us to save and invest more.

-mfd-

No related posts.