July 2018 Update

It's time for another monthly update. I have nothing witty to say because I'd rather be chilling instead of doing anything on the computer, so let's just get to it. At the end of July, my net worth is...

$132,873

Last month's tally was $124,533, for a difference of $8,340. From my calculations that's up and to the right on a graph, so it's good. According to my spreadsheet, I personally contributed $3,371 of that, which means $4,969 of that was market gains despite the market fluctuating like a ship tossed in the ocean.

I paid down all my credit card balances and kept my spending down. My wife and I went on a weekend getaway to a "haunted" inn/winery in the Finger Lakes in New York. I paid for all the drinks, food, and gas. It was worth every penny; like a mini-vacation that we definitely plan to do again soon.

Unlike previous updates, I don't have a whole lot to report for this. I honestly haven't done a lot of number crunching for this report because, well, there isn't anything significant that sticks out in my mind about this past month as far as saving. Basically, I just stuck to my plan of budgeting a couple of days prior to each paycheck, earmarking money to cover the bills, identifying a significant portion of the rest of the money to move into investments (while leaving myself about $150-200 until the next paycheck), and moving that money into my brokerage account. That's it.

Like I said, nothing exciting. Although it feels so good to dump money into the brokerage finally and to see my number creeping up and up. I guess I'm approaching what is known as "the boring middle" of the FI journey, where everything is predictable and not very noteworthy.

I hope to crunch some numbers for either a one-off post or maybe for the next report to illustrate how much I've been able to save over certain time periods, such as: since the beginning of this year; since I got serious about this path (which was probably around Sept 2016); and some other time spans that might be interesting to analyze and dissect.

I do this from time to time when I feel like doing some analysis and, honestly, I surprise myself by just how much money I'm able to accumulate in such a short amount of time. These are amounts I never would've believed possible years ago, and not because I was making less money, but because my lifestyle was much different then. I was spending more money than I was making or buying things that were unnecessary and viewed money differently.

For instance, since the beginning of this year (sorry, I can't resist doing one now), my net worth was $93,135. That means that, as of today, I've managed to sock away $39,738! In only seven months. That's basically a nice brand new car. Of course, not all of that was simply my contributions, but also positive market movement. Still, it's eye-opening to look at these scenarios to understand what's possible when traveling along this path if you're dedicated.

But, like I said, I'll have to sit down and crunch the numbers for some significant time spans and then try to suss out how much of that is my contributions vs market gains, etc. I think it'll be pretty interesting.

Until then, I'll leave you with this screen shot of this month's  net worth:

July 2018 net worth