Net Worth Check-in

[kork13]

For those in the growth phase of life, perhaps approaching or at least looking ahead toward FIRE, tracking your net worth is a useful practice to keep an eye on the progress toward "your number." Personally, I log our account balances & net worth every 6 months. Doing so also provides a look at what's been going on in the our finances, the broader economy, and what's going on in our lives.

I'm only starting this thread to discuss those periodic checks. Feel free to add what you will.

[disneysteve]

Despite slowing down at work and drawing about $20,000 from our nest egg so far this year, our portfolio is up $183,000 since 1/1/23 thanks to strong market performance.

[kork13]

As stated, I check our account balances / net worth every 6 months, on 1 January & 1 July. Here's our check-in for today:

Overall net worth: $1.82M
- Primary home: $370k --- excluding it, $1.45M invested/saved.
- Retirement: $805k
- 529s: $60k -- DS1 = 8y/o, DS2 = 6y/o, DD3 = 3y/o.
- Taxable investments: $486k --- includes: $250k rental home, $212k brokerage, $24k UTMAs (one for each child)
- Cash/I-Bonds: $101k --- includes $32k I-Bonds
Income is in flux with my impending move to Japan, but once it settles ... our total income will be ~$198k.

Notables:
- Total NW is up over $220k from 1 Jan. While a bit of that is from real estate value growth, and some is also new money invested, the vast majority of the growth was from market investment gains.
- That compares to last July, where our net worth actually went down by $60k as the markets whipsawed with the supply chain issues & everything else.

[Jluke]

Not that it matters now but I wouldn’t include the UTMA accounts.

[srblanco7]

H1 2023 update -

Investable assets up 12.5% YTD (+$610k). Asset allocation 76/18/6. Noting that we're still down 3.4% from our peak at the end of 2021.

This excludes 529 account balances as these are being used/about to be used w/ DD having a semester remaining to complete her degree and DS starting college in the fall.

If we look at it in "buckets" we're at 2 years of expenses in the cash bucket, 8 years in the income bucket (e.g., bonds), and 21.5 years in the long term growth bucket.

Will ER(-ish) with transition to PT on May 2 of next year (10 months to go but who's counting ).

[Fishindude77]

Have been retired without a job income for close to six years now.
Despite monthly distributions from the IRA our net worth has increased a bit due to the rise in real estate values and investment gains.

[james.hendrickson]

I think I'm still at around 400k.

[scfr]

Net worth up 4.6% YTD and 6.2% YOY.

We've both dialed back our for-pay workloads, but haven't had to make any withdrawals from the nest egg yet.
I'm working on getting DH to relax a bit on the spending side without much success yet. But I know he's listening & thinking about it because one day when I got home from work he asked me if I had read "Die With Zero."

[bjl584]

I haven't sat down to calculate the July numbers yet, but I know I am up significantly this year.
I'll post numbers when I get time.

[Jluke]

Almost back to Dec 2021 numbers.

that’s with retirement contributions and no withdrawals.

doesn’t feel worth getting excited about

[disneysteve]

Almost back to Dec 2021 numbers.

that’s with retirement contributions and no withdrawals.

doesn’t feel worth getting excited about

You're not wrong. We're still a bit under 12/21 numbers despite a year and a half of additional contributions.

[Drake3287]

My situation is a little more unusual than most people these days. Retired not to long ago with a government pension of nearly $10k a month. Total net worth not counting my pension is $2.5M which is includes our house (paid for), $750k in various investments and another $750k in cash earning at least 5% these days. I typically look at my investments on the first of each month and keep a running tally of my balances and how well they're doing. I value my pension at around $4.M assuming either my wife or I live to 85.

Although my figures may seem high to many, these are California figures so take them with a grain of salt. Most of the guys I retired with have since taken their retirement and moved out of California where their money goes a lot further.

[kork13]

Almost back to Dec 2021 numbers.

that's with retirement contributions and no withdrawals.

doesn't feel worth getting excited about

Interesting observation. Our retirements accounts (including 1.5 yrs of maxed contributions) are basically the same as in Dec'21. However, our taxable/non-retirement investments are significantly higher, by nearly 50%. I presume that is largely due to heavy contributions over that period (it's been a point of emphasis for us).

[srblanco7]

My situation is a little more unusual than most people these days. Retired not to long ago with a government pension of nearly $10k a month. Total net worth not counting my pension is $2.5M which is includes our house (paid for), $750k in various investments and another $750k in cash earning at least 5% these days. I typically look at my investments on the first of each month and keep a running tally of my balances and how well they're doing. I value my pension at around $4.M assuming either my wife or I live to 85.

Although my figures may seem high to many, these are California figures so take them with a grain of salt. Most of the guys I retired with have since taken their retirement and moved out of California where their money goes a lot further.

That's an impressive pension. Are you living off the pension or are you spending pension + more in retirement?

[scfr]

Okay y'all made me go back and look from Dec '21. We dropped from Dec '21 to June '22 but by Dec '22 we had recovered (up a whopping 0.6% for the year). We've always been fairly conservative investors, for a number of reasons. For many years we faced a lot of risk due to DH's business so we chose to balance that by investing conservatively and focusing our efforts on living a nice but fairly frugal life and consistently living below our means to save. Now as we are close to retirement we already have more than we will need to sustain us so there is no need or desire to take much risk. We are fixed income, balanced index, target retirement type boring investors with just a little "spice" for DH in the form of a couple individual stocks.

Edit to add: I'd say that although our desire or need for risk is low, our tolerance by some measures is pretty high. We got married even though it meant DH quitting his job so he could immigrate. Later he became a business owner with all the risks involved in that. We relocated from a HCOL to a LCOL. We have stayed the course during down markets, maybe feeling a bit queasy at times but never panicking. There are different types of financial risk that can't be measured just by AA.