Wednesday 1 June 2016

May 2016 Net Worth: $773,300 (+2.5%)

I continue to honestly be surprised at how my net worth continues to rise month on month.  My wife and I have been talking about finances a lot this month.  As crazy as it sounds this is the first time in my life I have felt any anxiety about money at all.

Why am I feeling anxiety when I am doing pretty decently for my age (for those of you who don't know I just crossed the big 30 a few months ago)?  Housing is the reason.  My wife and I are saving for a new house and housing in the state I live in is incredibly expensive.  I keep going round and round in my head the different options:

  • Do I sell some investment assets to be able to afford a better home?
  • Do I compromise on where I live to buy something more affordable?
  • Do I buy something more expensive and keep the investment assets but leverage myself more?
  • Do we go for the area we want but perhaps not the house that we want?
  • Can I afford to take extra leverage if I'm the sole bread winner and we have kids?
Obviously in a world with limited resources where I am not a multi-millionaire these are all very real questions and questions that lots of people ask...it's just my time to ask and go through these issues.

Why do I raise all of these issues in a post about my net worth?  I haven't been tracking my net worth performance this month all that closely and given the stress I have been feeling with the above questions it was a relief and pleasant surprise to see things continue to go well.

So how did I actually do this month?


My net worth performance breaks down as follows (note that totals may not add exactly as there are formulas which round everything to the nearest $100)


Let's walk through some of the major movements this month...


Direct Share Investments (+$1,300)

My share portfolio did remarkably well over the month for several reasons including a general increase the value of the stock market, a falling A$ increased the value of my US$ stock holdings which are a reasonable large portion of my portfolio and stock specific reasons which individual stocks I bought outperformed (finally) for the actual reason I bought them.

So with all these things going in my favour why didn't the value go up more?  Good question.  The reason is that I took the opportunity to sell some stocks that I had been holding for a long period of time and which had run quite a long way and I no longer felt confident in holding them.  These stocks were worth about $5,000 and although I will reinvest them in shares they went into my cash accounts.


Other Investment Assets (+$6,500)

I continue to invest in my employee share plan however the large move this month was actually my superannuation.  In January I moved out of a rather conservative default position and moved my stocks so that they were far more leveraged to international and Australian equities.

That move really hurt me for a few months as the stock market tanked however the falling A$ and the increase in the value of the share market and international stock markets has really helped this perform over the last month.  

Other Assets (+$12,400)

As I mentioned above, part of this performance was driven by the fact that I sold some shares and put them into cash while I wait for an opportunity to buy more stocks however the larger part of the movement was actually a significant savings effort by my wife and myself for a deposit for our new home.

My wife particularly has been saving like a fiend.  I think she is currently saving ~75% of her income and she is really focused on buying a new home in a few years.

Liabilities (+$1,300)

Although our liabilities went up this month this was to be expected as our credit card bill last month was artificially low.  This month we actually had a few large expenses including car maintenance costs as well as gas and power bills and council rates come due.

The increase was offset by the fact that our future liabilities balance decreased for the cost of some work that we are doing on our home.

Outlook

Finding time to do everything I need to do for finances is proving to be the biggest problem that I have.  One of the reasons I don't blog much any more is that I am spending so much time actually sorting through the finances associated with
  • Getting my stock portfolio back on track
  • Financing and supervising our renovations
  • Saving for our new home and cutting out expenses where possible
Next month I'm going to do a larger review of my portfolio and set out my goals for the following year.



2 comments:

  1. Hey 90M,

    As a rentvestor, I say keep renting ;), although yes interesting questions to ask & of course it's not as simple as saying keep renting especially when you have a family coming along..

    It'd be great to hear what you end up deciding & congrats on the increase this month..

    I will get back to your email as well, I haven't forgotten! :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey Jef!

    I actually stopped being a rentvestor about a year ago now. I did it for ~5 years and then got married and we moved into my investment property. Unfortunately it's not in the area I want to live long term so it will eventually go back to being an investment.

    I could honestly go back to renting but my wife isn't that type of person. She wants a garden she can work in and grow vegetables in and a house that she can make her own. It is more that issue and the fact that we are looking at our next place and how do I make that a reality.

    Thanks for stopping by and looking forward to chatting soon!

    ReplyDelete