April 2017 – $99,927.31- Net Worth Update (-$7,248.73)6 min read

April marks our fist month this year that we actually had a down month... Womp, womp... I'll explain below what happened, but first, we should be getting to what happened in April.

Fun things we did in April

April turned out to be a month of birthdays! We went to a couple of birthday parties and even had a big one that we hosted ourselves! We have a doozy during this time of year because both of our kids and my wife's birthday fall within twelve days of one another. This year we decided to have a big party for our kids so that we could knock out both with one party! We ended up having about 30-35 people and 10 kids over that afternoon! It was a lot of fun, even though the weather didn't cooperate with us and we ended up having to do everything indoors.

Another thing that happened is that we replaced our roof. It's nice to have this done and we were able to do a few things because of it. We are now refinancing the house and I was able to lower our home insurance premiums by around $140 a year. Although it was nice to knock that off the list, we now have to work on replenishing our emergency fund since we pulled from it to pay for the roof.

Lastly, we also got to make another trip to the zoo where we had purchased membership passes to last year! This has been a great investment as we've been 5 or 6 times and everything is free to do there with our passes.

Why I post my net worth updates publicly

If this is the first time you've stumbled upon my monthly net worth reports, I would like to explain why I choose to write them.

First, I love the accountability they force on me about handling my finances. I'm posting to be transparent and to really try to explain what happened over the last month that moved the needle for our family.

Second, I'm hoping to inspire and motivate others to reach to make their financial future better. I wanted to show that our journey is not all straight up success with no bumps in the road. Everyone has setbacks, but we can't let that get us down! We have to keep pressing forward!

What Happened to Our Net Worth This Month?

Boom! Things seemed to nose dive this month, didn't they? Well, It's actually quite simple. We've been looking to replace our roof for the last three to four months and this is the month that it finally took it's hit on our net worth. We ended up paying $8,200 for the replacement and we're very happy with the results of the roof. If we hadn't done the roof, we would've ended up with about a $1,000 upwards tick, so we will have to see how it goes for the rest of the year. 

Net Worth - April 2017

 Assets

• Home Value - $160,000 - Holding on to this number since our appraisal was done before our refinance (August 2014).  

We are actually working to refinance with our mortgage company and finally getting down to the 15 yr term (cutting off another 2.5 years!) and also dropping over 1% on our rate! Hopefully, next month I'll be able to report back that this has been finalized! I can't believe how easy it's been to do the refi too. I actually got a letter in the mail to do a mortgage review and decided to check in and see what they could do! Really glad that I did!

• Work Roth 403b -  Moving along nicely as we continue our contributions and keep growing the account!
• Traditional and Roth IRA's - Nice bit of growth this month as we are letting the market do it's magic!
• Auto Value - It goes up, it goes down... just cars doing their normal thing here...
• Cash Money - We saw a slight decrease this month, mainly due to having to replace our main TV. Here's the run down:
  • Sinking Funds took an $1667 hit. We had a minor car repair (~$250) , got our septic pumped for our 5 year inspection ($240) and had around $200 in medical along with other things.
  • Groceries were pretty good this month, although we ate out too much this past month. We spent $781 of which $260 was eating out. The biggest part of it was taking my wife out to Fogo De Chao for her birthday ($150+). 
  • Medical came in at $200 this month, so lower than past months. Still need to start funding this account with about $50 a month I think. Starting this in May to help dig out of this. 
• Emergency Fund Savings - Lowered our emergency fund by $8,200 for our roof replacement. Made $15.07 in interest this month. We will be working hard to start growing this account to replenish it. 

Liabilities

Home Mortgage - We keep seeing small chunks eat into this mortgage. We continue to just make the minimum payments, but with only having a 20 year mortgage, this moves down pretty quickly. This past month, our principal just topped $427! When we started, this number was only about $380, so that's extra money going towards our mortgage each month! I love seeing the principle grow each month to take out bigger chunks or our mortgage. Looking forward to the day we get to start putting extra money away towards this paying it down even faster.

As I said above, we are working on refinancing our home right now to get a bit lower of a rate, going from 4.625 down to 3.375 and cutting off two and a half years off the mortgage again! Also, it looks like the principal payments will bump up from $427 a month to $600 and continue to grow! Another cool thing about taking this new loan is that it will, for the first time, put more towards principal than interest each payment! Can't wait to report back and see it go into effect!

YTD Net Worth Growth

January 1st, 2017 : $102,049.03

May 1st, 2017 : $99,927.31

Total Growth YTD : -$2,121.72 (-2.10%)

Last Year's Growth: $18,336.16 (21.88%)

Take Away for the Month

April wasn't the perfect month for us, but it was to be expected with the expenses that happened. We are going back into savings mode for a little bit to get our emergency fund back up as quickly as we can, but then it will be back to investing as quickly as possible. We are going to need to make a tough decision on whether to stop investing to build up the emergency fund again, as there is only about $250 a month extra in our budget right now. 

How did your April go?