Thursday 21 March 2013

February 2013 Net Worth: $355,000 (+2.6%)


Value% Change
Assets$713,000+1.5%
Liabilities$357,000+0.4%
Net worth$355,000+2.6%

I must admit that February's performance surprised me on the upside.  Rather than any one big impact it was actually a combination of several small factors that made the performance much better than I was expecting.  In my January 2013 net worth post I was hoping for my net worth to reach $350,000 and as indicated above I managed to do much better than this.

Some of the things which impacted the result included

  • The allocation of my employee share investment plan shares from the previous 6 month period.  I sold these very soon after issue.  The way it worked out for this period, I made almost a 50% gain in the 6 months that I held the shares.  The minimum guaranteed return is 15% over the six months so this was a significant out-performance.
  • Very strong equity market returns.  Even though I sold my employee share investment plan shares during the month my share investments actually increased on an absolute basis.
  • A fall in the AUD / USD exchange rate.  A significant amount of my investments are in USD investments.  I did this when the currency was particularly strong and when US investments were trading very cheaply.  This has been a tactic that has been paying off for me in spades
  • An increase in my employee share investment plan:  As I have said before this is an automatic increase that happens and is a great savings tool.
  • On the downside my credit card debt increased dramatically:  I had several big expenditures which I put on my credit card which showed up in my credit card balance.  These included my car insurance as well as signing up for the CFA course (more about this in days to come)
Overall I was particularly happy with this months performance.  For March, however the outlook is much more bleak.  I will have to pay off my credit card balance and suspect I will not have much left over to save or put into my home loan (as of writing I have not put anything into my home loan account). Also (as flagged in my 2013 financial goals) I ended up moving out of home which has increased my expenditure dramatically - I will do a post on this shortly.  

I think March may be the first month since I started tracking my Net Worth that it decreases dramatically.  My goal for the month therefore is to keep my net worth flat at $355,000.  Given I am 2/3 of the way through the month and I already know what much of expenditure has been I think this may be a challenge!

As an aside:  This post was late (compared to the usual timing on my net worth posts for the reasons outlined in my Back on Deck post yesterday.  Thanks once again to all the support from my readers.

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4 comments:

  1. Welcome back mate! We need more posts!!

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    1. Will definitely be posting more! I have so much stored up material that it's all about finding the time to write it now...thanks for the support

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  2. BTW, do you include super in your assets?

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    1. For the purposes of my net worth yes. My super provider makes it really easy to see the available balance at the end of each month so I just use that value.

      However I do not include it as a form of investment in my expenditure tracker posts. Those posts are more of a budgeting exercise and as I never see the super money I don't budget for it at all.

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