Posted by Tim Stobbs on June 30, 2011
Long term readers might remember that my June updates typically suck. This one isn’t much different.
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?
Posted by Tim Stobbs on April 30, 2011
Well this month I hit an interesting milestone. I managed to max out our lump sum prepayment option on our mortgage for the 12 months. Which in practical terms means we put on almost $23,000 in lump sum payments in the last 12 months in addition to our regular payments. No wonder the mortgage balance is dropping like a stone.
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?
Posted by Tim Stobbs on March 2, 2011
While I wasn’t expecting anything interesting for this update I did hit a minor milestone. See below.
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?
