Making Me a Millionaire

Net Worth Update

I’m back from my NYC trip and now it’s back to work.  Looks like February was a relatively good month.  Here’s where we stand right now and I’m pretty pleased with the way things are going.

No red!  Seeing all green makes me a happy person!  You’ll notice there was a significant increase in the amount of cash we had.  This is because my husband is still on his severance from his old job (it runs out in April) so we’re currently collecting two paychecks which is nice.  We’re taking his entire paycheck from his old company and putting it away because we don’t want to get used to having 2 paychecks since we know it’s not permanent.

It looks like we have recovered from January and did pretty well this past month.  There has definitely been quite a change since I’ve been tracking the progress of our net worth.  If you’re currently not tracking your net worth, I encourage you to do so because it is so rewarding to see how far you’ve come and it gives you the motivation you need to continue saving and investing!

Feb Net Worth

Well, it looks like this month has been a terrible one when it comes to the stock market.    I was excited last month and thought maybe a recovery was on its way but this month wasn’t what I was hoping it would be.  Let’s hope the January indicators won’t be an accurate in the portend of 2010!  I saw that the loss of $17K was in green in the chart above but it should be in red.  Just too lazy to redo and upload again!

How have the rest of you been doing?  Was January a bad month for you as well?

January 2010 Net Worth

Here’s an update on my net worth for this month.  I’m feeling good with every month that passes!  But then again, when the economy has hit almost rock bottom, going up is not a big surpirse.

This month, we’re in the green by $26548.60!  The only thing that depreciated was my car.  We actually sold it (haven’t gotten the check yet though) for $24,000 so I know we lost $1k there but that’s OK.  I just canceled the auto insurance for that car so we should be saving a little bit more money.

Here’s a graph that shows how much the net worth has gone up in the last few months.

This has been the best month so far!

Next up:  Once we get the check from the car we sold, I’d like to use that money (and pull out some money from our cash savings) to pay off that home loan of $36,978.55.  With that paid off, we’ll have an extra $600 a month to play with and we’ll save ourselves a couple thousand dollars in interest.

Where Do You Stand?

So today I was curious to find out where exactly my husband and I stand compared with people our age and compared with people who make around the same amount of money.  I did a little bit of Googling and discovered some handy tools on CNN. At age 30 and an annual income of $145,000 this is where we stand:

With our current net worth hovering around $300k, I’d say we’re doing pretty well compared to others who are our age.

However, compared with others who have a similar income, I guess we’re not doing as well….

A grade of “B” is not bad but there are definitely areas that we can improve on.

Based on the Financial Health calculations, I need to:

• Allocate more money into stocks
• Decrease the percentage of money we have in company stock
• Increase our life insurance benefits

So I’ve learned that we are doing well for our age but for the amount of money that is coming in we should be doing better.  My guess is that since most people who are making $145K are probably older than us, they’ve had more time to accumulate their assets and therefore have much higher net worths.

After we move, I’d like to straighten out our investments and invest in more stock.  My husband will be participating as much as he can (we’ll have to figure out what the best contribution amount will be)  in the employee stock purchase program but I’d also like to diversify our investment portfolio.

NetWorth Update

November was a good month!  Everything was in the green for me and my net worth increased by quite a bit thanks the stock market doing a little better.

My goals for the month of December:

1) Keep our dining expenses below $400.

2) Keep our grocery expenses below $400.

3) Put another $2,000 into savings.