June 2018 Net Worth Update – $134,418.07 (+$1,089.72)8 min read

So long June, hello July! Can you believe we are already half way through the year? It's going by so quickly. Hope your money goals are on track for the year. If not, let's double down and get it done.

In June, we had a lot of fun. We visited the zoo, the beach, got set up for summer reading at our local libraries, enjoyed a week long staycation when my wife's brother's family came into town to visit. We got to enjoy a full day at Santa's Village. Evelyn had a two week long acting workshop that ended with her performing at our local opera house for two performances! We had a wedding where Jenni and I got to spend the night kid free thanks to Jenni's dad, which was very nice. We spent Father's Day over at their house as well. I guess you could say that we were all over the place! Summer is made for that though, right?

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 0.82% growth overall in our net worth, with 0.72% of it being from our investments. The rest of the growth came from our emergency fund and our mortgage payment. Even though this month's overall number isn't as impressive as the last couple months, it's still moving in the right direction. Here's how the number broke down:

Net Worth Numbers - June 2018

 Assets

Home Value

$180,424 - Our mortgage company held this number steady this month. The mortgage market was slow going this month as rates continued to edge upwards.  This number is way below where Zillow is, which dropped to $191,700 from $196,000 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

Our growth this month moved up 2.38%, but not as high as last month's 5.08% growth. This account is continuing to grow at a steady clip with our bi-weekly contributions.

Traditional and Roth IRA's

This month, the IRA's disappointed with an average -.4% loss. Not a terrible loss, but it did shave a little bit off our investment balance for the month. We don't see any need for changes at this point though.

Kids Brokerage

This month, we had a small down month, losing a whopping $0.12 (0.01%)... We didn't contribute anything to it this month. Last month, it grew by 2.6%. Our change jars are building up, so we might have to do another contribution soon. This account mainly only get contributions when the girls get monetary gifts or we have extra to throw in there from our saved change.

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Brokerage Account

After 2 down months, we are finally up a little bit this month. The account grew a measly 0.44%, but it did grow... Hopefully, it can earn back some of the losses before year end.

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

We are continuing to see a decline in value this month, dropping another 1.58% this month compared to 3.6% last month. 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 

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 only took an $833 hit this month compared to $1,270 last month. The heaviest hitters this month were medical ($402), auto maintenance ($203), and gifts ($120).
• Groceries were way better this month at $652.13, down from $951.47 last month of our $625 budget. This month, we spent $87 in dining out. We made one really big grocery trip this month, where I was by myself with no kids. We did have a few smaller trips in there too though.

Emergency Fund Savings

This month we were able to grow our emergency fund quite a bit. We added $945 to our balance. This mainly came from our third paycheck from May though. Currently, we are sitting at 58.4% compared to last month's 52% to being fully funded. However, we are going to be having a very big tree cut down and turned into firewood this next month since it is pushing our shed up on one side. It is the tallest tree that we have and it's not even a very nice looking maple. It will be nice to have this one gone and have the stump ground as well. We are looking forward to having the extra space to decorate around our shed and not worry about what the tree will do to it over time. Unfortunately, that's going to set us back $1,700. People might not think we should use our emergency fund for this, but we feel it's something we need to do.

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

Yay! We knocked out over $627 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 167 more payments if we don't pay anything extra on the house.

YTD Net Worth Growth

January 1st, 2018 : $129,092.91

July 1st, 2018 : $134,418.07

Total Growth YTD : $5,325.16 (4.12%)

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

Take Away for the Month

So happy to extend our net worth growth for a third month in a row this year! But, I think I'm more excited that we were finally able to get the grocery budget under control this month. I'm going to shoot to do the same for next month! Even though it was a mixed month, we still came out on top which is always fun. And we did it while still having a very packed schedule with lots of fun activities! Have a great July everyone and I hope your June was as fruitful as ours!