“Wooohooo” – I’ve reached a milestone in my net worth - $90,000. I’ve just updated my net worth and after adding everything up as of today my net worth is $92,189.11. The more amazing thing to me beyond reaching the 90k milestone is that in the last month I’ve saved over $2,300. My monthly budget, excluding savings, is only $2,000.
Don’t get me wrong I wish I normally saved 50% of my income each month, but my savings rate is normally about 37-40% each month.
I think part of the reason for the savings increase is I received two work expense reimbursement checks that were about $1,000 but on the flip side I had several irregular expenses this month that totaled over $500 (¼ my normal monthly budget). My irregular expenses included a 60,000 mile check up for my car, booking in advance a night at the Hike Inn for Mr. Be-Mine’s B-day in May, and an additional $100 given to charity on top of my normal monthly contributions. All in all still a very nice net worth increase.
Fortunately, especially for this month or I’d have been in trouble since irregular expenses exceeded ¼ of my budget, included in my budget each month is savings to cover these irregular expense that range from maintenance to gifts, and everything in between. Now if I’d been truly living pay-check to pay-check I’d have had to either adjust my spending habits for the month (but quite frankly there isn’t enough fluff to adjust to account for $500 unexpected spending on a $2,000 a month budget), I’d have had to dip into my loose job/major medical expense emergency fund or I’d have had to put these expenses on a credit card. (Or I supposed all but the 60k mile check up I could have chosen just not to incur that expense if it weren’t for having the savings, but since personal finance is about personal choices, I wanted to do those things and more importantly I had the savings to do them).
PS I’ve changed the format of my net worth on the left-hand side. For now I’d decided to use an excel document but I’m planning to invest some time in networthiq. So be on the lookout for more changes at the end of March when I do my next update.
2 comments:
Congrats, All your hard work paid off, must feel great and you should be proud. Just keep going, you know you can and have the willpower to do it now.
the new format is much easier to read - i use excel for my personal budget and keep a % column which shows me how far i've come from "rock bottom" i find it helps to reinforce my steps
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