Goodbye April and Hello May!!!! As you know we like to be open and honest with our journey to financial independence so we thought it was about time to share our net worth progress each month.
I’m a huge fan of the Aussie Firebug who has a successful blog and podcast of the same name. He has tracked and posted his net worth with a blog post every month since July 2015. I’ve only been following him for the last 2 years, but all of his net worth posts are available here for you to look at (its quite inspiring). His posts start with a net worth of 161k and at the time of writing this post it was 887k (March 2021)
I’ve tracked my own net worth for the last 2 years and enjoy seeing it grow over time. Being a Microsoft Excel lover I track it in in a custom made spreadsheet which is available here. I also track it on a day to day basis on a free IOS app called ‘My Net Worth’ so I can see how I’m going over the month, and then enter the details from the app into my spreadsheet.
Net worth – $935,309 (up $21,275)
Assets – $1,288,365 (up $25,054)
It was a really good month for us with house prices growing steadily in our area over the last few months. We are very conservative with our house price and base it on actual sales of comparable houses in our local area not just realestate.com.au’s track my house feature (we also allow a -10% buffer).
Other contributing factors to our net worth this month are consistently investing thanks to Pearler’s auto investment feature. This month was particularly good as we had a dividend pay-out which was reinvested into purchasing more shares.
Our superannuation continues to grow at a good pace thanks to my husband and I both receiving additional superannuation benefits above standard benefits. My husband receives 17.5% employer superannuation contributions, and I have deferred tax benefits for any super contributions that are made to my account.
Our micro investing accounts and crypto account also continued to slowly grow during this time.
What assets do we include?
Often I see a lot of chatter around what should be counted towards your net worth. I don’t believe there are any hard or fast rules, and as you know I’m a huge believer in the saying ‘You do you and I will do me – its a no judgement zone here‘.
For us we like to keep things simple and don’t count our depreciating assets like cars and the boat (otherwise we’d be constantly changing the prices every month).
I also count our primary place of residence towards our net worth as we intend on selling it as part of our financial independence plan.
Additionally we count our retirement accounts (called superannuation in Australia), taxable share/brokerage accounts, and our crypto (yep I know super controversial to add this one in but what the hell).
Liabilities – $353,056 (up $3779)
As you can see our home loan increased this month and this is no mistake. We made a withdraw from our redraw account today in preparation to pay for the $4000 bill for renovations next week. Our redraw contains our Emergency Fund and renovation funds. We plan to slowing replenishing our renovation funds over the next few months by making additional payments to our mortgage.
What liabilities do we include?
For liabilities we keep things simple and include anything and anyone we owe money to.
How do you calculate net worth?
If you don’t want to download the free IOS app or use a spreadsheet you can calculate this manually.
- Writing down all of your assets and liabilities separately.
- Then add up all of your assets together to get a figure (write this down).
- Then add up all of your liabilities together to get a figure (write this down).
- Then take the sum of your assets and deduct the sum of your liabilities.
- This is your net worth.
Net Worth = (Sum of your Assets) – (Sum of your Liabilities)
Happy Calculating !!!!! If you don’t want to do the calculations yourself the Net worth Tracker I use is available in my Etsy shop for $5.50 (click on the image below for the link).
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Frank on FIRE 