May 2018 Net Worth Update – $133,328.35 (+$2,918.21)7 min read

May is already over. We are now at the fun in the sun months. The kids are out of school and we have much more free time to go places and our schedule is not nearly as tight. May closed out our first school year with our oldest, Evelyn, finishing up Kindergarten with a bang.

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 have seen growth in almost all of our investment accounts, other than our brokerage account. Funny, I wrote this exact thing last month! I'll take it. For the first time since February, our mortgage value has not changed this month with our mortgage company, so it remained flat. Overall, we ended up adding 2.24% to our numbers. Here's how they broke down:

Net Worth Numbers - May 2018

 Assets

Home Value

$180,424 - Our mortgage company held this number steady this month. I think with the shift in mortgage rates, we are going to see the market go flat for now, but who knows.  This number is way below where Zillow is, which is now over $196,000. 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 even higher than last month's 4.45% growth to 5.08% this month! This account is continuing to grow at a steady clip with our bi-weekly contributions.

Traditional and Roth IRA's

we grew pretty well in May with a 2% gain between our IRA accounts. Our Roth was a little skewed this month as we made a one time contribution ($50) to allow us to use up the cash portion in the account to purchase another share of the S&P 500 index fund. We were holding a little bit of cash and I got sick of seeing it sitting in the money market account, not invested.

Kids Brokerage

Another nice month for the kid's brokerage account with Stockpile! We didn't contribute anything to it this month, but it grew by over 2.6% this month, more than last month's 2.5%. Love seeing that nice growth! 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

Another down month here, but not nearly the drop that happened last month (-12%). We fell another 1% this month. I'm hoping that we will see some strength come back in June for the stock and it will rebound.

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

Big drop in the vehicle value this month, with a 3.6% decline. Not sure what makes the value of my cars worth less this month, other than they might have hit mileage that makes them less desirable... We continue to love our cars and are expecting to get some great mileage out of these cars in the future, so this number is not very important to us.

Cash Money 

Wha!?! A 74% gain in our cash position this month??? You don't say! Really, it all comes down to the fact that we had a third paycheck this month and it fell on the last day of the month. I don't expect it to remain this high for the long term. It very "flowy".

Here's how our bigger expenses played out:

• Sinking Funds took a $1,270 hit this month. The heaviest hitters this month were medical ($272), gifts (265), and amusement ($233).
• Groceries were way too high this month at $951.47 of our $625 budget. This month, we spent $160 in dining out. This would have been lower, but we decided to do a Mother's Day brunch as well as another dinner at a restaurant. We have quite a few groceries in the house to start the month off, so we are going to do our best to get this number down for June.

Emergency Fund Savings

We had yet another month where our emergency fund was stagnant and slightly negative. We had to pour another $410 into our PT Cruiser to replace the front CV Axles. The car is running much better now. I'm looking forward to June where we will be able to turn our 3rd paycheck from May into savings for this account. We are currently sitting at 52% funded, down from 53% last month.

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 crossed the $625 mark on our principal balance this month and bumped it to over $626! Another payment in the books and that much closer to our 15 year payoff.

YTD Net Worth Growth

January 1st, 2018 : $129,092.91

June 1st, 2018 : $133,328.35

Total Growth YTD : $4,235.44 (3.28%)

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

Take Away for the Month

Loved being able to extend our growth for the second month in a row. Hoping to manage the grocery budget better this next month to make for even better gains for the month. Just keep swimming, right Dory?