August 2016 Update

It's that time of the month again (no, not that time! Get your mind out of the gutter), which means it's time to check my net worth. I'm a little bummed that the S&P was down for the third straight day before this post because it means my number has dropped since I last checked it. It kinda reminds me of a song: You take the good. You take the bad. You take 'em both and there you have...The Stock Market. (Did you sing the theme to The Facts of Life? Good for you, if you did.) Now let's get on with it.

My Net Worth as of 9/1/2016 is

$65,849

Despite my numbers slipping a little, I'm still up from last month, which is good. Always progressing up and to the right just means I'm on track to pull the plug on a full time career. I was crunching the numbers and reviewing my charts (yeah, I'm a bit obsessive like that) going back to when I first started keeping track of my net worth. My earliest recorded number is from January 2015. At that time I had $21,711. That's pretty good, but it feels great to see how far I've come. I've added nearly $45k to that total and didn't get serious about my savings until about a year ago. Still, the graph is a nice, gradual transition upward.

I've been good about sticking to my budget: buying good, cheap groceries that I can cook myself and have plenty of leftovers. I went to Aldi last week to buy some things on the cheap because I also wanted to splurge on steaks and shrimp for me and my wife. As a matter of fact, I enjoyed some shrimp tonight. I felt it was a special occasion since I'm taking two days off this holiday weekend to give myself a much needed break from work.

Unlike last month, I don't have anything special to report as far as increasing my savings this month. I've just remained diligent about watching my spending and putting the rest into savings and investments. Here's a screenshot from Personal Capital.

As you can see from the peak before the drop, I broke $66k. It felt good when I saw that and less so when the market slipped. But, I'm ahead and that's great. Despite Personal Capital reporting a gain of $3,974 over the last 30 days, I only managed to save $3,587 of that. The rest is interest and capital gains. I'm anxious to cross the $100k milestone to see bigger gains.

Something I've focused on during the last couple of months was bringing my emergency fund up to $15k, which I managed to do. In order to do this, I stopped putting money into my taxable account. My Roth IRA is already maxed (I always max it in January to get it out of the way) and my 401k is on auto pilot, scheduled to be maxed by the end of the year. Now that I've brought my primary EF up to the level I wanted, I'm going to focus on the secondary account with Ally. I'd like to get it up to the same level (actually closer to $20k so I can use it to front load my rIRA come January). I've got a plan to put $1,000 a month into the high yield savings account and then put the remainder of that month's money into my taxable account. I projected this strategy on my scratch spreadsheet and found that it'll take a few months to reach my goal and then I will just focus on pumping money into my taxable account.

Theoretically, the strategy seemed sound. I plan to stick with it for a while, but I have a feeling I'll feel guilty about not contributing more toward the taxable account. For now I plan to stick to my guns, but time will tell if I alter the plan. It's not like I haven't made alterations in the past. As long as I keep paying myself the way I've been doing, then I figure it's all good.

Also, according to my spreadsheet, I have a savings rate of 64% for the year. That's just the money I've put into investments and savings accounts. It doesn't include any interest or capital gains. So I'm happy about that.

I'm supposed to receive 3 paychecks this month instead of the usual 2, so I'm excited to see how everything looks next month when I make another update. Join me in 30 days to find out!