May 2008 Net Worth
I mentioned earlier that I’ve been an active reader of personal finance blogs for a little over a year now and as a result have been tracking my net worth since April of last year. I’ve been debating the value of trying to present that history on the blog, but in the short term I’ve decided I’d rather just post this month’s update against last month for now.
| May | April | Change (%) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assets | |||
| Cash | 43,210 | 58,032 | -14,823 (-25.5%) |
| Investments | 10,537 | 10,267 | 270 ( 2.6%) |
| Retirement | 89,762 | 86,603 | 3,162 ( 3.7%) |
| Home | 315,000 | 315,000 | |
| Debts | |||
| Credit Cards | 5,854 | 18,329 | -12,475 (-68.1%) |
| Student Loans | 17,531 | 17,570 | -39 ( -0.2%) |
| Mortgage | 261,542 | 261,953 | -411 ( 0.1%) |
| TOTAL | $ 173,582 | $ 172,050 | $ 1,532 ( 8.0%) |
All in all not a terrible month. We managed a gain in our net worth and paid off a significant amount of credit card debt — this came from savings as we were participating in some credit card arbitrage. Unfortunately it looks like most of our gains came in our retirement accounts which means that we’re still spending more than our net income monthly. While I have put together a budget for “core” expenses (mortgage, food, gas, utilities), we’re still spending more than is getting put into taxable savings. This is definitely highlights the spending problem that I’m working to beat.
While my wife and I are definitely putting a good share of our money into retirement accounts, we still buy a little too impulsively with our net income. We’ve put some measures in place to help us out, but it seems we’re still letting our spending get ahead of us. We’ve agreed to only go out for meals two times a week, and both of us try to bring lunch to work at least 4 days a week. This has definitely helped us keep our monthly credit card bills a little trimmer, but we often let seasonal spending get out of control.
For example, since it’s springtime we’ve starting working on projects outside the house and it seems that we keep needing new garden tools, plants, soil, etc, etc to get our yard into shape. Since the beginning of April we’ve already spent over $863 on yard and garden expenses at Sears, Home Depot, Lowe’s and our local garden stores. I’m really not sure how we could trim that number back while still accomplishing all we want to in our yard this year. We did buy most of the vegetables for our garden during an annual sale at one of our local garden shops, and the new lawn mower we got this year from Sears was purchased during their early season sale, but even those discounts are a fraction of what we’ve spent. In the end I’d hope that we’ll end up saving some money through the summer on food based on what we’ll harvest from the garden, but it’s difficult to quantify how much that’ll be.
It would seem that the best plan would be to have a plan. Probably we need to sit down and think about how much we intend to spend each spring on garden-related purchases, and look to put extra money into savings through the year to meet that goal. Things like the new lawn mower ought to be a purchase that’ll last a while, but it’d probably be better to earmark some money for that specifically in our savings so the large credit card bill at the end of the month isn’t such a surprise. It’s not rocket science, for sure, but all those $75, $100 and $200 purchases sure can add up quickly.
I’d love to hear suggestions from others for how they deal with season spikes in spending. Spring is definitely the time of year that seems to hit us hardest annually, even more than Christmas.