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?

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?

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?

Assets

House $349,000
RRSP $26,100
LIRA $10,600
TFSA $13,600
Pension $35,200
Wife’s RRSP $18,500
Wife’s Investment Account $12,600
Wife’s TFSA $10,700
My Investment Account $6,100
High Interest Savings Account $800

Debt
Mortgage $54,500
HELOC $4,900

Net Worth $423,800 (-$800 or -0.2%) [+ 10.5% YTD ]
Investment Net Worth $129,300 (-$5200 or -3.9%) [+ 1.9% YTD]
Mortgage is down by $29,000 or 74% of my goal for 2011.

Talk about kicking a guy when he is done. Ouch, these stock market drops have really hit my investment net worth for the last four months.  So much so that my net worth actually drop even with all my payments to reduce my mortgage principle.

You might have noticed I have actually used my line of credit, I borrowed a some cash to pick up a few investments during the recent downturn.  Hopefully this will pay off in 2012.  In the mean time I’m at least on track to meet my mortgage payoff goal by the end of the year.  This of course leads into my big plan for 2012: make my last mortgage payment on Dec 15, 2012 and then be complete debt free!

So while the road is long, there are some bright spots on the horizon and I’m hopeful it isn’t a train that is going to run me over. *grin*

Any questions?

Assets

House $349,000
RRSP $27,600
LIRA $11,300
TFSA $11,400
Pension $35,700
Wife’s RRSP $19,900
Wife’s Investment Account $12,400
Wife’s TFSA $8,900
My Investment Account $6,200
High Interest Savings Account $1,400

Debt
Mortgage $58,900
HELOC $0

Net Worth $424,600 (+$3,700 or +0.9%) [+ 10.7% YTD ]
Investment Net Worth $134,500 (-$5400 or -3.8%) [+ 6.0% YTD]
Mortgage is down by $24,600 or 63% of my goal for 2011.

June typically isn’t a good month for a net worth update since I have several large bills due around this time.  As such I usually see about $5000 leave savings to cover off property tax and house insurance.  I could balance off the savings during the year with a balance owing, but that seems like over kill for one crappy update a year.  Also the hit to the equity markets nicely reduced my investment net worth even further.

The good news in all of this mess of numbers is the mortgage keeps dropping nicely.  Actually I checked as of today I could stop lump sum payments and my mortgage would still be paid off by the end of my current term in spring 2014.  So at least there is some good news in all of this.

Oh, one last thing.  Someone had previously asked how can I do these updates without my files being up to date in a previous post.  The answer is I don’t use my files at all for these values, I pull all of them directly from each website so the values are as up to date as I can get them.

Any questions?

Assets

House $349,000
RRSP $28,100
LIRA $11,600
TFSA $11,200
Pension $35,000
Wife’s RRSP $20,200
Wife’s Investment Account $12,800
Wife’s TFSA $8,800
My Investment Account $6,600
High Interest Savings Account $5,600

Debt
Mortgage $68,000
HELOC $0

Net Worth $420,900 (+$19,300 or +4.8%) [+ 9.8% YTD ]
Investment Net Worth $139,900 (+$1700 or +1.2%) [+ 10.2% YTD]
Mortgage is down by $15,500 or 40% of my goal for 2011.

So with the housing market finally kicking back into gear I was able to get a few similar listings to finally update my house value this month.  I had been avoiding the update for a while since I really didn’t have more than a listing or perhaps two that were similar so it was tough to get an estimated market value.

My investment net worth was very stable over the time frame, while I did make minor contributions to it over the last two months, the markets also decreased a bit which offset most of the increase.  Oh, well that happens when you have a a fair amount of equity exposure.

I did notice one interesting fact while I was calculating our combined TFSA balance, which now stands at $20,000.  Not too bad given we only put in $10,000 so far…so a 100% gain in just a few years looks impressive as hell until you realize it was mainly just dumb luck that those stocks have done well and the stocks had fairly high yields when we bought them (AQN.TO, EIT.UN.TO, REI.UN.TO).

Any questions?

Assets

House $340,000
RRSP $27,700
LIRA $11,500
TFSA $10,600
Pension $33,500
Wife’s RRSP $20,200
Wife’s Investment Account $12,700
Wife’s TFSA $8,600
My Investment Account $6,500
High Interest Savings Account $6,900

Debt
Mortgage $76,600
HELOC $0

Net Worth $401,600 (+$18,200 or +4.7%) [+ 4.7% YTD ]
Investment Net Worth $138,200 (+$11,300 or +8.9%) [+ 8.9% YTD]
Mortgage is down by $6,900 or 17.7% of my goal for 2011.

If I haven’t mentioned this recently let me repeat something:  saving for early retirement is a really bloody boring exercise a lot of the time.  Sorry to disappoint you if you have other ideas on the situation, but the reality is it is mostly about keeping up a savings routine.  Yet today I hit one of little milestones that makes the journey a little more interesting as we finally broke the $400,000 net worth mark.

So that made me curious on when we past the $300,000 mark?  Well according to my records that occurred in Dec 2009 ($304, 500), so from then to now was a mere 14 months.  Pardon?!?!  Does that work out to almost $7000/month?  How is that even possible?

The answer is simple: the minor miracle of compound interest and a savings plan.  That $100,000 gain is broken down into the following:

• Paying off mortgage $44,600
• Investment net worth up $39,500
• House value up $13,000

The mortgage is the classic case in point.  As I continue to put on additional lump sump payments that drives my interest costs down and allows more of my regular payments to go to principle.  Although each payment doesn’t change the situation that much, the compounding effect starts to build up until now over 80% of my regular payment is now going to the principle.  So even if I stopped making lump some payments the mortgage would still be paid off in under five years.  It’s now snowballing all by itself and I’m just giving it an extra push down the hill.

Any questions?

Assets

House $340,000
RRSP $26,800
LIRA $11,200
TFSA $10,200
Pension $29,200
Wife’s RRSP $19,700
Wife’s Investment Account $11,700
Wife’s TFSA $8,400
My Investment Account $6,100
High Interest Savings Account $3,600

Debt
Mortgage $83,500
HELOC $0

Net Worth $383,400 (+$13,400 or +3.6%) [+ 25.9% YTD ]
Investment Net Worth $126,900 (+$10,000 or +8.5%) [+ 28.6% YTD]
Mortgage is down by $37,700 or 87.7% of my goal for 2010.

You know what for failing to make my mortgage goal for the year I still managed to do over 85% of that goal which is fairly damn amazing when you consider I took a  20% pay cut from my largest source income for half the year.  So even in failure I still feel good about what we got done this year.

Also I have to say I’m blown away how much the investment and net worth have increased this year with both of them over 25%.  What I find particularly interesting is if you strip out the gains in the house value from the net worth that is still an increase of $65,900 or 21.6%.

What is really mind blowing is the long term net worth trend from back in 2006 when I started this blog.

• 2006 – $80,200
• 2007- $215,000
• 2008- $219,600
• 2009- $304,500
• 2010- $383,400

Hope you have a great New Year!

Any questions?

(Click to see larger version)

Goal #1: Pay down mortgage principal by $39,000.

This year I’m giving myself a little slack since I’m getting better at estimating what I can reasonably do in a year.  So even when I really wanted to round that number up to an even $40,000 I resisted the temptation.  For those of you wondering where this will leave me in the longer run I should be close to paying off my mortgage by the end of the first quarter of 2013 if I keep up this pace in 2012.

Goal #2: Self publish my book, Free at 45, by end of the first quarter 2011.

After working on/off on this project for the last few years I’m rapidly getting to the point I just want to get the project over with.  If you have never written a book before let me be honest.  It’s a LOT of work and more than anything just takes commitment to get it done.  Depending on how badly this turns out or not, I might consider taking book proposals for launching a 2012 title.

How about you?  What goals are you planning to do in 2011?

Assets

House $340,000
RRSP $26,000
LIRA $10,800
TFSA $9,700
Pension $26,000
Wife’s RRSP $14,800
Wife’s Investment Account $12,100
Wife’s TFSA $7,800
My Investment Account $6,100
High Interest Savings Account $4,000

Debt
Mortgage $86,900
HELOC $0

Net Worth $370,000 (+$16,000 or +4.5%) [+ 21.5% YTD ]
Investment Net Worth $116,900 (+$10,300 or +9.6%) [+ 18.4% YTD]
Mortgage is down by $34,300 or 79% of my goal for 2010.

I’m in the last part of the year now and overall I’m pleased with the progress on my net worth this year.  Over the next few months you should see some extra jumps in the investment net worth as I pile on the RRSP contributions to reduce my tax bill.

I keep working on my mortgage goal even when I know I won’t hit it this year.  I took a reduction of hours at work which made making the goal impossible.  There won’t be much progress on this goal for the rest of the year, but it looks like I should break the 80% barrier at least.

Any questions?

(Click to see larger version)