Posted by Canadian Dream on December 30, 2011
Ugh, where has my year gone. These last few months have just flown by on me. Anyway here is my year end net worth update.
Assets
House $367,000
RRSP $27,100
LIRA $10,900
TFSA $15,300
Pension $40,500
Wife’s RRSP $27,900
Wife’s Investment Account $11,800
Wife’s TFSA $10,500
My Investment Account $6,000
High Interest Savings Account $2,100
Debt
Mortgage $42,900
HELOC $2,700
Net Worth $473,500 (+$14,500 or +3.2%) [+ 23.5% YTD ]
Investment Net Worth $149,400 (+$9,800 or +7.0%) [+17.7% YTD]
Mortgage is down by $40,600 or 104% of my goal for 2011.
The stock markets continued to be nervous over sovereign debt levels and have keep returns low for the second half of 2011, which would be a problem for most people’s net worth, but not mine. So what the hell happened? Simple, as you can see by my mortgage goal for the year I focused on debt reduction mainly which boosted my net worth for the year nicely regardless of the stock markets. Of the $90,000 increase of my net worth just about half of that was from paying down my mortgage.
Overall I’m more than happy with 2011 results, which is good since my goal for 2012 is to finish paying off my mortgage which is slightly above what I managed to pull off in 2011. As a stretch goal for 2012 I would also like to finish paying off my line of credit (HELOC) which I had previously used to put some money into investments earlier in the year when the market was down.
It’s interesting to note that after several years of concentrated effort my wife’s RRSP finally exceeds my RRSP. We realized a while back that to split income in our early retirement years we would need to do this, so it’s nice to see that threshold reached. In case you weren’t aware, income splitting only applies on pension income (not RRSP under 65), and since you often can’t take your pension early you need to have some spousal RRSPs to split income.
Happy New Year to you all!
Any questions?
Posted by Canadian Dream on December 14, 2011
Well it’s been a good year so far and now that I’m on vacation I’m actually starting to get caught up on my backlog of things to do around the blog. One of those items was a final report on my 2011 goals.
For your memory the goals were fairly damn straightforward:
Goal #2 was the publish my book, Free at 45. This was completed back in March of this year. Sales were relatively modest, but I didn’t go broke doing it, which was the main idea.
Goal #1 was to pay off $39,000 of my mortgage. While it isn’t the official year end yet, I can project that the final mortgage balance will be about $43,000. That means I would have paid off $40,500 over the year. Yep, I exceeded my goal by $1500!
This now sets me up nicely to go after my 2012 goal of paying off the mortgage completely. So that will be a bit of stretch for us given what we paid off in 2011, but as the balance keeps dropping so does the interest portion of our payments which should assist us in bridging that gap.
So how have you done on your goals for 2011? Pass, fail, or did you have to switch them along the way?
Posted by Canadian Dream on October 28, 2011
I feel like I’m on a roller coaster on these net worth updates. Down and then up…at least going up is fun.
Assets
House $367,000
RRSP $27,300
LIRA $11,000
TFSA $14,400
Pension $38,000
Wife’s RRSP $21,500
Wife’s Investment Account $12,900
Wife’s TFSA $10,800
My Investment Account $6,200
High Interest Savings Account $1,500
Debt
Mortgage $47,600
HELOC $4,000
Net Worth $459,000 (+$35,200 or +8.3%) [+ 19.7% YTD ]
Investment Net Worth $139,600 (+$10,300 or +8.0%) [+10% YTD]
Mortgage is down by $35,900 or 92% of my goal for 2011.
Like all good things, sometimes it takes some patience to get there. Case in point this net worth is so hugely different from my last one it is almost scary (ok poor joke in honour of Halloween).
So a few major things shifted in the last two months. I got some much better data on housing prices in my area and the value of my house shot up again…not too surprising since I came across a stat saying housing prices on average are up almost 15% from last year.
The other improvement was the remarkable stock market jump from my last net worth update at the end of August. That helped correct that poor result and put things back on track.
The last good news is my mortgage goal for the year should be easily reached at this point. Actually I might be able to even exceed it a little bit if things go well.
Any questions?
