October 2005 Financial Status / Net Worth Update
Before newer readers get excited, my large credit card debt is all at 0% APR interest. Please see my posts on taking advantage of no-fee 0% APR balance transfers for more information. In short, I’m borrowing the money for “free” and depositing it somewhere I can earn up to 4.12% interest on it, while these offers are still around. I don’t pay interest, I get paid interest!
For the first time in recorded MyMoneyBlog history, our net worth went down since last month. It was primarily due to my fat Fall tuition bill and the accompanying textbooks. Also, I had to buy a last-minute plane ticket as well. The stock market did go up, but overall we ended up $618 poorer than last month. Our non-retirement funds went down also to $44,097, leaving us farther away from our Mid-Term Goal. It’s not so bad though, I’m confident that we can make it up this month. I’ll need to run the monthly budget numbers next.
October 4th, 2005 at 7:34 am
how come u have more cash savings than last month despite only your wife’s currently working?
October 4th, 2005 at 12:24 pm
The beauty of credit cards =). Notice my credit card debt increased more than my cash savings. The bill hasn’t come for my tuition bill yet, so I’m keeping the money and earning interest until I have to pay it off.
October 4th, 2005 at 12:32 pm
How are you getting a monthly 4.0% return on your cash savings? That’s huge. (Or did you just deposit ~$1900 more in there?)
October 4th, 2005 at 2:07 pm
That’s 4.0% annual interest. The cash increase is due to income and interest on my cash. Some of it will be spent over this month as credit card and other bills come in.
October 4th, 2005 at 3:29 pm
A small hiccup in your overall plan. You still seem to have all well under control and moving in the correct direction for the most part. Keep up the good work.
October 4th, 2005 at 5:41 pm
4% is good but have you considered holding less cash and investing more?
October 4th, 2005 at 5:49 pm
Right, you have only $5000 in your taxable trading account. Don’t you want to have something like $10,000 to fool around? I mean, you can easily get more than 4% ROI in the stock market.
October 7th, 2005 at 2:15 am
Bill,
If you have reliable strategies on consitently getting >4% ROI in the stock market, please do tell.
October 10th, 2005 at 8:43 am
I just started looking at your site and I’m curious why your leaving you Credit Card debt at such a high interest rate? You could easly take out a line of credit, transfer the balance, that will boost your credit score. Then sign up for a much lower interest card with a balance transfer. I did the same and went from paying 17% interest to 3.9% on 15K in debt. Makes for a substantial savings and faster pay off. Just a thought.
October 10th, 2005 at 10:05 am
Lee, please please please read the 2nd (now 1st) paragraph of my post =) I get multiple comments and/or e-mails about this every month.
November 3rd, 2005 at 9:07 am
Just curious. What is exactly your mid-term goal meter measures? 44% of 100k, i.e. 44k. What is this figure? I don’t see that number anywhere in your statement.
November 3rd, 2005 at 9:14 am
In the post above, there is a link called Mid-Term Goal. Try that =) 44k = non-retirement funds.