It’s hard to believe it’s the first week of November. Thanksgiving is almost upon us with Christmas shortly behind. I hope to start regularly providing a financial independence update. We use a free Personal Capital account to track our net worth progress including our total liabilities and assets. This is a super helpful tool in giving you a bird’s eye view of your financial situation.
First 90 Days
Since this is our first financial independence update, I’ll do a 90 day report ending on October 31, 2018. As you can see from the Personal Capital graph, our net worth went from $58,152 to $80,903! Remember net worth is your total amount of assets (cash, savings, and investments) subtracted from your liabilities (loans and debts).
At the end of October 2018, I had $45k in student loans as our only debt. Technically Personal Capital shows we vary a few thousand dollars every month with credit card liability although we completely pay off our credit cards every month. That just the nature of using credit.
Paying Down Student Loans
So how exactly did we increase our net worth by almost $23k in 90 days? This is where a tool like Personal Capital really shines. It helps you figure out what changed. We payed almost $3,000 towards my student loans in the past 90 days decreasing my loan balance from $48k to $45k. This included a $2,200 chunk payment at the beginning of August 2018.
Investing in Tax-Advantaged Accounts
We then have both invested around $14k in our tax-advantaged accounts with approximately 20% going into an intermediate treasury bond index fund and 80% into a total stock market index fund. The stock market has been in a bit of a downturn the last couple of weeks, so we aren’t making money. In fact, we’re down about $4,000 due to the October stock market dip. I view the downturn as getting to buy the stock market at a discount because the market always eventually increases in value. So I’m okay with some big dips or corrections
Saving Cash for Possible Big Expense
We also increased our cash savings by $10k in the past 90 days. This is primarily due to possible fertility treatments in our future which are extremely pricey. Since we live on the previous month’s income and now have an additional $10k in cash savings, our money market fund is quite a bit larger and earns around 1.8% annually totaling to around $38 per month. Not a bad start for just having money in savings.
Final Verdict
Our goal is to be financially independent in 10-15 years. As of the end of October 2018, we’re 5.3% of the way towards our goal of $1.5m. This doesn’t seem like much, but we’ve only really gotten serious about financial independence sometime in mid-2018. I also finished grad school in June 2018, so I wasn’t contributing too much financially except racking up 40k in student loans and a bit of income from my per diem job.
Now that I’m not in school I’m working around 36 hours with my per diem job while I looking for a nurse practitioner job. We’re definitely at the beginning stages of this journey but I look forward to the adventure ahead! Check out Personal Capital if you haven’t already and start tracking your own financial journey.