Tracking your financial progress month to month is a very important part of becoming financially independent. If you don’t know where your money is going or how you are making progress on your goals, you will never reach them. You can determine your net worth in just 10 minutes, so if you haven’t done it lately don’t put it off any longer.
It has been just over a month since our wedding and honeymoon, so it is nice to get our finances back in order and “assess the damage”. We have been able to re-coup some of the costs of the wedding by selling decorations on Craig’s List and returning things we didn’t use to stores. This helps gives us some extra cash for things we would possibly keep if we had the room in a house, but just don’t have the space or the need for it right now. On to the numbers!
The biggest change here is that I moved my company stock into the short-term savings category as an emergency/cushion for now. I didn’t cash out the stock, but I am viewing it more as an option to use it if we need to for travels, an investment in my wife and I’s new businesses, or to pay off my wife’s student loans.
Another piece that might look alarming is the credit card balance. While it looks like we only paid it down $1,500 this month, we paid them all off in full and are just waiting to the next payment date to bring the balance down to zero again in September. The charges on it are the last few expenses from the wedding and honeymoon. It will be paid off by next month’s report.
My wedding was just over two weeks ago and as I’ve recently discussed, weddings can take a huge toll on finances. With that being said, our wedding was worth every penny. We were blessed by beautiful weather, helpful family and friends, and wonderful vendors to work with. It was exactly what we wanted the weekend and the two week honeymoon that followed to be like. Pictures from us and our photographer will be coming soon.
As we returned from our honeymoon and got back to our apartment, we reflected on the past three weeks of fun and sun, new family members and friends, and a relaxing couple of weeks to start our marriage together.
Now let’s take a look at how this major life event has affected our finances.
Insane Levels of Spending
The last costs for the wedding (final payments to vendors), expenses from the honeymoon (food and festivities), and the booking of a stay at the same resort in Cabo during the next 18 months (more on that in a future post) caused July to be another expensive month. We spent $6,767.86 during July and have spent over $27,000 (regular and wedding expenses combined) in the past three months.
When you compare this three month average of us spending $9,000 to a regular month of expenses before all the wedding craziness of around $2,000 or $2,500, it is quite astonishing that we were able to take the big a hit and still keep our net worth at a reasonable level.
In addition to the high levels of spending, the recent turmoil in the stock market over the past few weeks has caused long-term savings in my Roth IRA and 401k has gone down over $4,000. (And now after yesterday’s huge drop they have fallen at least another 5 %.)
It’s time for the latest update to my net worth transparency series. Overall, there is only a small change, but underneath the numbers there are some big costs for the wedding. While our total net worth didn’t change very much, there is A LOT going on financially for my fiancé and I right now.
Also, keep reading to the end of the post for a complete look at how my net worth has changed each month from May 2008 (when I graduated college) till now. Let’s jump right in!
The Good
There was some positive performance in the retirement and long term savings portfolios we have, which now pretty much equals our complete net worth by themselves. Some good news for next month’s report is that on July 1st I received a sizable amount of stock that has vested after three years at my job. I am still waiting on the paperwork and the access to sell it, but that should give us a nice positive bump in July to offset the remaining wedding costs.
With a new and improved format making it easier for you to see progress, here is the latest Net Worth Transparency report for May 2011.
Overall, this month was a big downer net worth wise, but it was mainly due to two main categories Wedding expenses and our Income changed.
I have tracked my net worth for the past two years and it has been the single most important tool for keeping me focused on improving my financial situation. I initially just tracked my spending, created monthly budgets and monitored my retirement savings, but once I started calculating my net worth each month I made significantly more progress towards achieving my goals and paying off my debt.
I believe that discussing personal finances should not be as faux pas as it has become. People are willing to share other extremely personal topics with each other, but when it comes to talking about debt or financial struggles, they avoid it.
To encourage you to be less afraid of discussing your financial situations with others, I am going to share with you my net worth progress each month. Read the full article →
