Tuesday, June 1, 2010

May 2010 Net Worth

For anyone new to BFS, I post a net worth update at the beginning of every month in order to keep myself motivated and to involve BFS readers.  Please feel free to ask questions, make suggestions, or even post your net worths too.  I am a particpant-motivated blogger, so please jump on in.

I calculate our net worth as listed below.  I don't include the value of our possessions, I round down to the nearest hundred for assets, and I round up to the nearest hundred for liabilities.  I also don't include my husband's pension account since I'm too lazy to keep up with it and it shouldn't actually matter until he retires.

Assets
1. Cash - $20,800 (we had vet bills, bought $5000 of stock, and paid for most of a cruise for next month)
2. Stocks - $16,200
3. Retirement - $33,600 ($2400 loss, ouch)
4. Home - $130,000
5. Cars - $16,000

Liabilities
1. Home - $72,200
2. Car - $8,900  (We made an extra $650 principal payment in mid-May and are waiting for our regular payment to clear)

Total Net Worth = $135,500
Increase/Decrease = Down $1700 from last month  :-(

It sucks to go down, but that's not as bad as it could have been.  We lost $2400 in the retirement accounts alone not to mention the money we had put in this month, paid $300-$400 in vet bills, and paid $1550 towards our upcoming cruise.  We cut back on our food expenses and other fun expenses a bit so that our net worth wouldn't completely crash.  I'm also going to warn you that next month's "Cash" is going to plummet...we have upcoming dental expenses and we're probably going to conglomerate a few accounts to pay off our car.

I base the value of our home on two things: comparables selling in our neighborhood and the estimated appraisal by Chase Home Value Estimator.  I will always estimate low.

I base the value of our cars on Kelley Blue Book's Private Party Value of our vehicles in "Good" condition truncated down to the nearest $1000.  For example, if my car is valued at $4600, I'd calculate that as $4000.

Please feel free to visit the archive to see our past net worths.

6 comments:

  1. Thankfully, no major expenses last month. The market didn't help the net-worth though. I'm down for the month as well. $16,819 vs. $17,780, down $961. Guess I won't be retiring tomorrow. :-)

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  2. I don't even want to look at my investments at the moment. Maybe I will wait for a big stock market day! :)

    I need to look at the Chase Home Value Estimator. I have occasionally looked at Zillow to see my home's worth, but I don't know how reliable that is.

    To me, your 1700 drop is not bad at all!

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  3. @Everyday Tips, I use that Zillow
    I put in my address, city and zip, and for some reason it still places me in the next city...

    @Budgeting in the fun stuff
    Nice job, we paid almost that much extra on our house too, we (really I) wanted to get it paid off under 10 years (we missed by a few months, so it was paid of in a little over 10 years...

    Great job saving so much already!

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  4. MikeS, I guess I won't be retiring either. :-)

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  5. Everyday Tips, I wouldn't have thought twice about a $1700 drop if I didn't post it for everybody to see, lol. There's just something intimidating about everyone seeing your successes AND failures. I think it's funny that my blog teaches me humility. ;-)

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  6. Money Reasons, thanks so much! I hope you are hitting all your goals too!

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