2018 Wrap Up - How did you do?

[scfr]

Net worth increased 4.3% in 2018.
Financial assets increased 4.6%
Non-financial assets (house & cars) increased 1.9% (on paper - because we are under contract to sell our house I know the real value is higher than how I have valued the house on paper, and I'm cool with that)

Asset allocation at year-end is within sufficient range of targets that I do not need to make any changes.
Non-financial assets are below maximum "allowed" percentage of net worth.

Onward.

[Like2Plan]

I'm sure that will be very strange. Over the past couple of years, I've seen more and more articles in the financial publications about drawing from your retirement accounts. It used to be all about putting money away but as more and more baby boomers retire, the focus has shifted a bit which is certainly helpful.

While I'm looking forward to retiring, I'm not looking forward to actually starting to spend our savings. That will be a huge mental shift that will definitely take some getting used to.

I agree that is a real good thing. When I first started investing (some 40+ years ago) most of the articles I read were do X and Y and save a MILLION dollars for retirement! I suppose you have a have some sort of a generic goal to get the point across. It wasn't until many years later that I learned about the safe withdrawal rate to get you all the way through your retirement might be 2% or 3% or 4% (depending on how long you need to draw from it and the rate of return on investments used).

Lately, I have been focusing on what required minimum distributions (RMDs) are going to look like with our portfolio since most of our retirement savings is pretax. DH will be subject to RMDs in 6 years. For us, the RMDs will exceed the SWR very quickly, so I want to get out ahead of it.

[disneysteve]

Lately, I have been focusing on what required minimum distributions (RMDs) are going to look like with our portfolio since most of our retirement savings is pretax.

Since I only got access to a 401K a couple of years ago, over 70% of our money is in Roths or taxable accounts so RMDs aren't going to be quite as big a deal for us. We'll still have a nice chunk of money subject to RMDs but probably not enough to exceed the safe withdrawal rate. I haven't run any projections on that yet.

[~bs]

I actually dont even know. I do a net value estimate periodically, but wont really know for 2018 until i finish my books. I probably only contribute 15-20k to regular financial investments per year.

I'd hazard a guess that unrealized investment gain/loss is in the breakeven territory. I'd also guess that total increase in net worth for the year is somewhere between 100-200k

[bjl584]

I have to add everything up still, but it's looking like I'll be up slightly.

I purchased some real estate in 2018, so that is offsetting some of the losses that I saw in my equity portfolios.

[Gailete]

We sold our completely paid for rental property on December 19. I think because we didn't want to jinx anything, neither of us talked about the money and what we would do with it once we got it. The day of the closing I had come from what for me was an already long day of getting my IV, so the last thing I wanted to talk about was what to do with it now that we had it. When we did start to talk I realized that we could not have a coherent conversation without some numbers to guide us. So I spent free time over the next week plugging numbers into an excel sheet to get an idea or our assets and liabilities, how much we had in credit card debt, etc. Next year when someone asks this question I will be more ready to know how we did for the year. So finally a few nights ago I was able to share with hubby where we were at. I knew we had credit card bills but I hadn't totaled them. I was surprised to see that with all that we have had coming into our lives that takes money out, in the almost 17 years that we have been married, we still had less in credit card debt that what I had with Mr. Bigbucks in just 4 years! Man did that guy spend money he didn't have! Anyhow, as we talked hubby said something that I hadn't expected to hear, and that was for me to handle the money in the way that I saw best to do so. If we had paid off the credit cards in full with the money, we would have had some left over which would make a respectable EF for about 6-7 months (hard to tell) and that was all, but then the only tangible asset that would ever give us a large amount of money if needed was our house. I didn't want to be left with not enough to do the propane prebuy in Sept. or pay property taxes, etc. I'd been putting money for those aside this year and was very happy that I could pay cash for them and I hope to continue to do so!

So while I can't give actual % of numbers of how much better or worse we were this past year I do know that I feel better about our finances. Our sales from the pattern store were better than they had been these past few years. We paid cash for more things, etc. I feel good about how things are going. I was able to pay extra on the mortgage every month but one and paid extra on every credit card bill but one (as long as it is paid off by a certain date, no interest) all year. Things are looking up. Even with the nose dive at the end of the year, our IRAs and stock were still better than the end of 2017.

[LivingAlmostLarge]

Our NW went up $27k for the year. Interesting mostly due to debt paydown
Retirement assets -$1k, down $1k for the year.
Taxable Accounts -$17k, down $17k for the year
Debt - paid down $45k

We had a leased car we bought in December 2018 for $18k. That wiped out cash. We also paid off $20k in mortgage and $5k on the minivan. We also paid off our home renovation cash $35k, $10k private loan I owed my mom from college, $7800 private school tuition, and $5k in braces for DH and DK1. So we had a terrible year taxable cash savings wise, this year we should be back on track. I'm hoping that we can save all that cash we expended on debt paydown. Some off the debt I never had in our net worth calculations like home renovations, private loan to mom, private school tuition or braces. The only thing was the car loan.

Sometimes the best way to grow net worth is to pay down debt. Not owning my mom anymore and owning our car takes a lot of pressure off my shoulders.