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Home > Archive: October, 2020
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Archive for October, 2020
November 1st, 2020 at 01:41 am
My net worth has jumped $12,400 this month. It's a significant jump. Here is why:
I have not made a bunch more money this month. Rather, I did some calculating, and have a much more realistic sense of what I am going to owe in taxes. Since self-employment is new to me, I'm still learning what I am going to make and how much I will spend - all this makes it hard to know an exact amount for taxes. But, since this is my first year, I am not even sure how much I will approximately end up owing. I typically save away 40% of what I make and earmark that for taxes. But, it's close enough to the end of the year that I have a better sense of how much I will owe on the outside. I moved the rest to my savings/EF for now. If I end up owing more than I anticipate, I will just take money from there and send it to my taxes. If I end up owing less, I will take the excess and put it in my brokerage account. So, I ended up adding about $8000 more to my savings than last month.
The value of my house went up by $5800 this month (zillow estimate). If it goes on like this, by December, I should have 20% equity in the house, and will ask the bank to drop my PMI. With the extra I am putting towards the mortgage, I had anticipated that it would happen around April-May of next year. But, if it happens sooner, all the better.
My retirement accounts, brokerage, and HSA have all changed a nominal amount, and they are also reflected below. Unfortunately, most of them went down.
65,800 - House Equity
26,200 - SEP IRA
52,100 - 457 Account
19,500 - Brokerage
28,000 - Savings(EF)
3,700 - HSA
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195,300 - NET WORTH
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Posted in
Personal Finance,
Net Worth
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2 Comments »
October 24th, 2020 at 03:20 pm
Pre-pandemic, I had booked a trip to Europe with travel to Iceland and England. It was supposed to be a celebratory trip to mark my starting to be fully self-employed. To celebrate that I can set my own hours and take vacation whenever I wanted for however long I wanted. No more applications for leave to be approved! I had really been looking forward to it. It was supposed to happen in August. My sister and her family were to have joined me for a portion of it.
Needless to say, the trip did not happen because of COVID. Iceland Air, who I had booked the trip with, canceled one leg of the flight several months ago, and I immediately cancelled the trip and applied for a refund. They kept delaying the refund. Anyway, about a week ago, I got notification that my refund had been processed. It showed up in my account today, five months after I submitted the refund request.
The refund amount is $1665. It is bittersweet. I really wish I could have gone on this trip. But, on the other hand this will pay for about 3 months of expenses. Oh well - Iceland will always be there. I can go when it is safe to go.
A question - is anyone else having trouble copy-pasting your entries? I lost my entries so much over the past week, that I wrote it out in a different document and tried to paste into the editor. But, it does not save my entries when I do that. I have to type out the whole entry each time with no guarantees that it will actually save. Very frustrating!
Posted in
Budgeting,
Personal Finance,
Saving Money,
Travel
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3 Comments »
October 14th, 2020 at 03:38 pm
Hello World,
Last year, when several months of blog entries were lost, I lost my blog. All my entries were within the time range of lost entries. I kept waiting for them to be re-instated, but it did not happen, so I am starting again.
I am 41, single, no kids, in the healthcare field, and am newly self-employed.
Here is the gist of my financial situation:
For all my twenties, I was a financial idiot. I saved nothing, spent more than I could afford, did not learn about managing money, and got myself into a giant mess of high-interest consumer debt.
In my early thirties, this started catching up with me, and I started to educate myself about money and how to dig myself out of the hole. Unfortunately, two things were working against me - the high interests made it harder to make a dent in the debt, and I was in an abusive relationship which also included financial abuse and a gambling habit. I divorced when I was 36, and spent the next four years pulling myself together financially. I started working for myself on the side, paid off all my debt (~$58,000), purchased a new-to-me car in cash, saved an emergency fund of $20K, saved 5% for down-payment and purchased my current home, and determined that I will never again carry consumer debt.
I have just started my forties. Earlier this year, I left my salaried job of ten years, and went into full time self-employment. I work 2/3rd as much and make twice as much, and was the best decision I could have made for myself. For the first time in my life, I am not living paycheck to paycheck. For the first time in my life I am not constantly thinking or worrying about money. So, for the first time in my life, both my money and my time actually belong to me. It is a tremendously freeing experience. I am truly happy for the first time in my life.
My current focus is trying to save and catch up on retirement planning and investing as much as I can. Never having had money to invest before, this is new to me and I am learning as I go. I hope to retire at the age of 55. However, it will require consistent and aggressive savings to do since I am starting so much later than I should have. I hope to save 75% of my post-tax income if I can. At my current income level, I think this is doable. Years of living frugally due to necessity also makes it easy to save - it has become habit by now. It also helps that I have no debt and am a single member household. I have a small amount of retirement from my previous job, but apart from that, everything else I have saved in just this year.
My financial strategy is as follows:
1. Save by maxing out tax-deferred retirement contributions. Since I am self-employed, I get to save more than the traditional IRA amounts.
2. Invest in taxed retirement accounts. (Can I have a Roth IRA in addition to the tax-deferred? Need to check up on this)
3. Invest the remainder of what I can save in a brokerage account
4. Pay off my house in 10 years. It is a 30-year mortgage, but I want to prioritize paying this off because I only have one income coming in and want to get this off my back as soon as I can. This provides psychological relief, but also if I don't carry a mortgage into retirement, I need to save less for retirement.
5. As I get closer to paying off my mortgage, purchase some rental property and pay that off by the time I am retired. This should provide passive income for me to live on in addition to savings/dividends until I can draw on retirement and social security income.
Here is where I currently stand. (** I am not going to do exact decimals. I will round debt up and assets down to the nearest hundred)
60,000 - House Equity
27,000 - SEP IRA
52,000 - 457 Account
20,000 - Brokerage
20,000 - Savings(EF)
3,900 - HSA
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182,900 - NET WORTH
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Edit: Thanks to a comment by Petunia100, my NW jumped $253,000 this morning. I guess I was incorrectly counting my mortgage twice. I have been in positive NW for a while now, but my brain has just caught up with this fact. WTH! How am I so lucky? Petunia - thank you so much!!
Posted in
Budgeting,
Debt,
Personal Finance,
Retirement,
Saving Money,
Net Worth
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10 Comments »
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