July 2018 Net Worth Update – $135,756.50 (+$1,338.43)8 min read

Have you finished your summer bucket list yet? Because July is gone! Holy cow, it's flyin' by. I hope you are taking some time to make some great memories with your family and hitting your money goals as well.

July was such a fun month for our family. We got to visit lots of family, have some cookouts, our girls had VBS (vacation bible school) for a week, and we even put our girls in the same room and created a toy room out of the other room. My wife got her annual raise (WOOHOO!) so we are able to save and invest more. We did a bunch of renovations on our outside shed by rehabbing our shed with new shelves, new floor and a new roof. WE even cut down a tree that we've wanted to cut down since we moved in over 8 years ago.

We've already gotten our school supplies for the year, have you? Can't believe we will be back to the school routine in just over two weeks from today... Hope we can move the bedtime routine back to normal.

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 really explain what happened over our month that helped move the needle for our family. Second, I'm hoping to inspire and motivate others 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?

This month, we saw a 1.00% growth overall in our net worth. Our investments grew by 3.83% this month, which is awesome growth for us. Even though our emergency fund took a hit (more on that below), our assets still grew more than our mortgage principal paid off. Here's how the number broke down:

Net Worth Numbers - July 2018

 Assets

Home Value - +$0.00 (0%)

$180,424 - Our mortgage company held this number steady this month. Mortgage rates fell slightly in July, but are up almost 0.5% since this time last year. This number is way below where Zillow is, which dropped to $189,226 from $191,700 last month. I update this when my mortgage company updates it on their end as I feel it's still a conservative number overall.

Work Roth 403b - +$956.75 (+4.83%)

Wow, we were able to snag a 4.83% growth this month over our 2.38% growth last month as our contributions and market growth helped out tremendously this month. However, we have decided to scale back on our contributions temporarily to build our emergency fund back up because we have been just treading water on it for the past year. So, this account will not be growing nearly as much in the near future.

Traditional and Roth IRA's - +$1,285.60 (+2.88%)

Our IRA's did well with a 2.88% growth compared to last month's -0.4% loss. The markets did well here as well, enough said.

Kids Brokerage - +$33.26 (+3.88%)

Another up month here as well. After last month's slight downward trend, this account continues to earn more than we could ever earn in a high yield savings account. Not the biggest grower, but still nice for just being a passive investor for the month.

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Kid's College Fund - +$246.66 (+18.11%)

This account is still small and with our $200 per month contribution, it is growing rapidly. Still, we had $46.66 of pure growth this month, which is quite nice considering how much we contribute. Love seeing this account grow each month in our 529 account.

Brokerage Account - +$70.06 (+6.42%)

A nice month finally. We are still down about 15.5% for the year on this, but hoping that they can turn it around and get out of the red. This account is just a play account for us and we do reinvest dividends from these stocks.

Long term, our dividend yields are over 8% from when we purchased, so our money is still working hard and we are dollar cost averaging in each quarter with the dividend reinvestment into these stocks. The best part about this account is it's small and it's more of a play account to us. It is a very small portion of our overall portfolio. Hopefully, we'll have better numbers to report next month.

Auto Value - -$358 (-4.57%)

Another bigger drop in value on the vehicles this month. We dropped 4.57% compared to last month's 1.58%. Overall, we put more miles on the vehicles this month then last month, but didn't have any maintenance other than our tollway replenishment, which I'm very happy about.

We track our vehicle value for tracking sake, but we generally run our cars until they are useless for the most part. I have started tracking mileage as well and found that we drove our Impala twice the amount that we drove the PT Cruiser. The PT is just a commuter car for my wife though.

Cash Money - +$119.20 (+18.09%)

Our numbers are more in line with our normal cash balances as we had a little bit of time to get the $$$ moved around this month.

Here's how our bigger expenses played out:

• Sinking Funds did awesome this month as we only spent $457 this month compared to $833 last month. The heaviest hitters this month were medical ($160) and home repair ($142). The main cost to the home repair was because we had to take one of our cats in for her annual visit.
• Groceries were bad this month. We spent $935 this month compared to $652.13 last month of our $625 budget. This month, we spent $201 in dining out. Around $100 of the groceries was school supplies for the year though. We made 3 decent sized grocery trips this month. I'm looking forward to getting back to my meal planning next month.

Emergency Fund Savings - -$1,644.74 (-13.98%)

Ouch, we took a hit this month. The main reason was due to a tree being taken down for $1,700 this month. We are currently down to 47.45% of our fund needed for our fully funded 6 month emergency fund. We scaled back investments this month tremendously to start being able to contribute more to our emergency fund again. That should add around $300 per month to what we are already putting away. On top of that, we were able to apply most of my wife's annual raise to this account as well, so that will bring in another $100 per month. Total, we should be able to put away roughly $600 per month to get this account built back up.

Even though we are stopping our investments for now, they should continue to move as the market does. We are trying to follow Dave Ramsey's baby steps and step 3 is to solely focus on building your 6 month emergency fund. So, we are going back to focusing on that step as we have had issues getting the fund built up while investing.

Liabilities

Our only liability that we have left is our home mortgage. All student loans, cars, and consumer debt have been paid off. Working to pay down the mortgage, we continue to refinance to shorten the term and lower the interest rate when possible to keep our payment the same. We are a little high on our monthly percentage for housing, roughly 33% of take home pay. This is one reason we're finding it harder to get to the 15% savings towards retirement. Through pay raises, we'll lower that percentage and build back up to get away from it being that high in the future. And, we always have the option to refinance back up to a longer term in the future if things get hairy as well.

Home Mortgage - -$629.64 (-0.47%)

Yay! We knocked out over $629 this month! Another payment in the books and that much closer to our 15 year payoff. I actually calculated it and we are now down to 166 more payments if we don't pay anything extra on the house.

YTD Net Worth Growth

January 1st, 2018 : $129,092.91

August 1st, 2018 : $135,756.50

Total Growth YTD : $6,663.59 (5.16%)

Last Year's Growth: $27,043.88 (26.50%)

Take Away for the Month

Glad to see the steady growth again this month. Hoping to continue the growth next month. Would love to get my emergency fund back up considering how much it's dropped off this year. Anyways, I hope this report has helped to inspire you to take control of your money and get started tracking your own money. Have a great August everyone!