October 2017 – $119,921.05 – Net Worth Update (+$369.16)7 min read

October gave us another small, but positive boost to our net worth.

Fun things we did in October

October brought along a lot of fun. My wife and I got to have a nice little weekend getaway while the girls got to visit with family for the weekend. We hosted a Friday the 13th get together in our community where we made a ton of chili and baked potatoes as well as had a nice campfire while the kiddos painted pumpkins to take home for Halloween.

Taking our fifth vacation this year, we traveled down to Texas, visiting family along the way. We got to visit Nasa, Galveston Beach and a few food places along the way. After that, my wife and the girls flew back from Dallas and I stayed and got my money nerd on at FinCon 2017. And I was even able sneak away from the conference one night to have dinner with my Uncle and Aunt who live just north of Dallas. You can read my recap here. After getting back from that, we finished off the month going trick or treating and getting together with another family in our neighborhood.

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?

Not a great month cash flow wise, but investments kept growing for us and helped us edge out another positive month!

Net Worth - October 2017

 Assets

Home Value

$174,000 - This is the number that I'll most likely be sticking with for the short term future. It seems to be a solid number, although Zillow is throwing a bigger number out there currently. I know that many others have said that Zillow seems to move around too much to be so accurate, but I'm going to stay conservative for now! Zillow is now showing that my home is worth as $186,672, but it changes all the time, so I'm holding back on that.

Work Roth 403b

The account continues to grow at a nice rate. We put the most of our contributions in here and are enjoying the ride this year! We put in around $550 of the $800+ gain! Love seeing our money make money!

Traditional and Roth IRA's

Pure growth here! Overall, we saw 1.56% growth in October. We contribute $45 a month into one of our Roth IRA's and will add to it after we finish building up our emergency fund.

Brokerage Account

We only own 2 stocks and aren't contributing monthly other then reinvesting dividends when they come in quarterly at this point. One stock lost 6.71% and the other grew by 5.7% for last month. We have almost even amounts in each stock, but it is a very small percentage of our overall portfolio, coming in at 2.2%. This is more just for fun and we are long both stocks and plan to just hold and let them continue to grow.

Auto Value

It goes up, it goes down... just cars doing their normal thing here... Although, after the almost 2,600 mile trip I just put it through, I would expect it to be dropping a bit this month.

Cash Money

We spent and spent this month, it looks like. Here's how our bigger expenses played out:

• Sinking Funds took an $1,679 hit! Not as bad as last month, but still pretty high. The big things that happened were we had both cat appointments for the year, racking up $340 in vet bills. Both cats are good, but this is for their yearly exams. We had $620 in vacation expenses, so that ate up quite a bit of cash. My wife bought plane tickets for a trip at the end of January since they were the best price that we've seen so far, so we pulled that trigger, spending just over $300 for those.
• Groceries were finally on par this month!!! So excited to be able to write that!!! We've been trying hard to keep this number down and we've finally hit it this month. I did roll over some expenses from the last couple days to this month, but we should be good going into November as well, hopefully! We spent $625.46. Our budget is $625.
• Medical came in at $85 this month. Currently, we put $50 a month away for this to help offset the costs.
• My Business Account took a decent hit with me going to FinCon this month. I spent $768 including my expense for buying my ticket for FinCon 2018.

Emergency Fund Savings

We had a small win this month, even though at the beginning of November, we had to pull some out to reconcile our sinking funds because we had gotten a little too far behind. This month should right itself though, since it's a 3 paycheck kind of month. We'll be able to bank almost a whole paycheck minus retirement, taxes and giving of course. We are currently 62.3% funded back towards our 6 month emergency fund.

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

Boom! Another payment in and we almost broke the $614 mark! We are paying off over $200 more than before we refinanced, although we won't break even until April or May 2018. However, we are less than 15 years away from paying off our mortgage now!

YTD Net Worth Growth

January 1st, 2017 : $102,049.03

November 1st, 2017 : $119,921.05

Total Growth YTD : $17,872.02 (17.51%)

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

Take Away for the Month

We are getting close to hitting last year's growth numbers! We have 2 more months to go! I'm hoping to quickly get past it and continue to move higher! I'm hoping we can make our cash work better this next month!

How did your October go?