Monday 1 August 2016

July 2016 Net Worth: $788,000 (+3.5%)

My net worth is up pretty significantly this month however other than saving a decent amount into our home loan offset account I didn't actually do all that much which is a little disappointing.

I still have plenty to do with respect to my personal finances before I'm in a position where I'm happy to just sit back and let my investments do their thing.  These are just some of the things that I'm looking to do:

  1. Get my individual stock holdings down to 10 individual stocks (currently at 11).  
    • I've been doing quite a lot of work on this and have managed to narrow what I hold
    • This does not mean that I only want to hold 10 securities. I'm willing to hold far more than that in broad based index funds but those are pretty much set and forget type investments that I don't need to think about all that much
    • I want to hold at maximum 10 individual stocks.  Any more than this and I honestly do not have enough time in the day to do them justice and I end up not knowing enough about the stocks I own
  2. Progressively transfer stock holdings into my wife's name
    • I currently hold most of my share investments in my name which is incredibly inefficient from a tax point of view (given that she is in a lower income tax bracket)
    • As I sell shares over time I want to move more and more into her name
  3. Work out what I want to do with my managed funds
    • Several years ago my parents gave me a portfolio of managed funds and they have slowly been growing over time
    • However they are quite high fee and they do tend to create tax issues for me each year so I need to work out what I am doing with these
  4. Move cash and stock progressively out of my interactive brokers account
    • Interactive Brokers is a great platform if you are looking to trade frequently
    • My investing methodology has been changing over time and I am far more a buy and hold forever type of person...interactive brokers isn't great for this especially given the inability to participate in DRPs or receive franking credits
I could keep going however these are just a few of the larger things I need to do to get my portfolio into shape over time.  Some of these I just need to sit down a do a bit of work and others I can only do opportunistically.

However that's enough about the future plan...let's see how I've actually performed this month.

July was a bit of catch up month after a dreadful June...



I've outlined below how I performed in different areas