January 2019 Update

Well, it's the third of February and I'm finally getting around to writing the first financial update of the new year. Looks like I'm really living up to my blog's name, after all, I am lazy. It gets really tedious writing these updates every month. However, watching the number grow is loads of fun. All right, enough of my bull shit, let's get to it. At the end of January, my net worth is...

$158,497

At the end of December, my net worth was $142,429. A difference of $16,068!!! Yeah, you read that right. It might seem like this is the best month I've had. Truth is: it's not although that is one hell of a difference. The end of 2018 was just a bumpy ride and the market was down. It's since rebounded, which is what the majority of that growth is reflects.

I managed to save a respectable $3,200 after tax, all of which is going into my HYSAs to replenish the $6,000 I used to front load my Roth IRA for the year. $1,975.47 went into my 401k; more than I expected because I received pay for unused vacation pay. The reason this was unexpected is because I thought I'd used all my vacation. Either way, I'm keeping quiet about it. That means, out of the $16,068 increase in my net worth, I actually contributed $5,175.47; the rest ($10,892.53) were market gains.

As far as expenses, I had to take care of a bad front wheel bearing on my car, as well as some other smaller repairs that I decided to take of now instead of later. These repairs cost me about ~$740 (1st appointment) and ~$145 (2nd appointment) for a total of $885. I ordered fast food a few times before finally reigning in my spending. Now I'm back to cooking/eating at home and scrutinizing my expenses.

As I said, I front loaded my Roth IRA with money from one of my HYSAs. I also adjusted my 401k contribution so I would get as close as possible to $19k as I can. This meant I needed to drop my contribution amount to 20% and then decrease it at the end of November. However, with the unexpected amount of my last paycheck, I had to go back to the drawing board to readjust the numbers. The new strategy is to decrease my contribution amount to 13% after the first paycheck in November, which should put my total 401k contributions at $18, 998.16, $1.84 less than the maximum. That's if nothing goes awry with my calculations.

I decided to increase my total cash holdings from $25k to $30k this year, even though I was actually only around $21k in 2018. So I plan to focus on funneling all my money into the HYSAs until there is $15k in each. At that time, I will turn my attention to splitting all my deposits into my Brokerage funds, concentrating mainly on increasing the muni bond fund I purchased last year.

That's basically it. Nothing overtly exciting. Here's a screen shot of my numbers.

Net worth for January 2019. A good start to the new year!