Goodbye May and welcome to the last month of the financial year (for us Australians) !!! As you know we like to be open and honest with our journey to financial independence so we share our monthly net worth. If you would like to see all net worth posts use this link here.
I’m not sure about you, but May was a pretty uneventful month for us. I would go so far as to call it boring from a financial point of view. May felt like we were just rinsing and repeating April. We automated our investing in April (Feel free to read more about how we automated our investing here), and so we just kind of sat back and let everything do it’s thing according to our investment strategy (You can read all about our investment strategy here).
I’ve tracked our net worth for the last 2 years and enjoy seeing it grow over time. I strongly believe that tracking can assist you on staying the course, because lets face it this getting wealthy business takes time (and it’s easy to feel like you’re not making progress and lose interest).
Being a bit of a spreadsheet nerd I track our net worth in a custom made spreadsheet which is available here for $5.50.
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 I enter the details from the app into my spreadsheet.
Net worth – $945,323 (up $10,014)
Assets – $1,298,073 (up $9,708)
Another good month here. Our asset increase was made up from our retirement funds (called superannuation here in Australia), and our brokerage.
So what did we do right?
We consistently invested thanks to Pearler’s auto investment feature and invested $4000 this month. Our retirement funds also continued to grow thanks to our generous employment 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).
So what did we change?
Changes this month included consolidating my superannuation from my 3 month contract role in the first quarter of 2021. We also made the decision this month to sell out our Spaceship (made a loss), and transfer it to crypto (so we’ll see how that goes….). Please note that Crypto makes up less than 0.1% of our net worth.
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 (down $306)
As you can see our home loan decreased this month after we withdrew for renovations last month. We didn’t pay any extra above the minimum as we are still spending any spare dollars over our investing on renovations. I don’t see the situation changing soon, and we actually will likely need to dip into this again in the coming months.
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 