Today

So, its been a couple of weeks. I kind of got tired of just posting solitaire post so I quit doing it for a couple of weeks to decide what I wanted to do with this blog. I'm still not sure. But I figured I would type about something today.

A major thing has happened in the last couple of weeks. The biggest one is we are now well below the 40K mark on the house. We are actually below the 35K mark now adding in the January paycheck. Something major happened once we got below the 40K mark. Something simply clicked, like we can do this!!! I talked to Susan about it a bit yesterday and she agreed, there was a psychological change at the first number going from a 4 to a 3. Maybe its because when we started with my debt, that was around what we started with. We were above the 40K mark, but not by much, and we got rid off all that debt in less than a year (closer to 7 months). Maybe, that is one of the reasons things changed.

To give you a little bit of an idea, let me tell you about the end of December budget. Susan and I went through the budget again, and reduced all of our weekly expenditures (which are: grocery money, household money (wal-mart type stuff), date money (for Susan and I to be able to do out to eat, see a movie, etc.), Greg stuff money (money we get that we can spend on whatever), Susan stuff money, and then the montly clothing money. By taking a simple 5 dollars a week from all of these categories, we freed up another 100 a month to send to the mortgage.

With the last raise that Susan got, and my surprise raise (none of my bosses have yet told me that I was getting a raise), we are now sending 3000 a month to the mortgage on top of the normal 604 dollar mortgage payment. Yes, we are managing to send more to Chase each month than my bring home pay. That's a very comforting thought when it comes to when we have a baby and Susan won't be working anymore. Not only will we be able to easily live off my income (sans solitaire) but we will also still be able to send money to retirement.

I have also sat down and made a new spreadsheet showing our net worth. Its a rather interesting process seeing those type of numbers and think about how negative we were and how much in the positive we are now. I'm actually keeping up with 3 numbers overall. The total net worth, net worth not including home equity, and then net worth not including home equity and without including Susan's IRA. There are reasons I'm keeping up with it like that.

Net Worth: Self explanitory, what we are worth overall including everything. Kind of have to track this one.

Net Worth w/o the House Equity: The reason I keep up with this one is for retirement. I don't see us ever having a house that is less expensive than the one we are currently in. That would mean that we can't really count the house equity toward our retirement fund.

Net Worth w/o the House or Susan's IRA: The reason I want to keep up with this number is to see where we stand as far as being able to retire early. I don't know if we will do this (right now, the numbers say no), but depending on outside sources of income, this might be a reality one day. Of course, the thing with IRAs is that you can't start drawing on them until you are 59 1/2. So if there is even a small possibility to be able to retire before then, we will have to have enough money generating interest without this account.

So where do we stand. The numbers look like this. I could only go back to October 2007 because of various factors....

October 2007: Net Worth: 99,586.35
Net Worth w/o House: 64,258.18
Net Worth w/o House or IRA: 25,568.75

November 2007: Net Worth: 109,210.03 LM: +8.81%
Net Worth w/o House: 67,961.87 LM: +5.45%
Net Worth w/o House or IRA: 29,641.71 LM: +13.74%

December 2007: Net Worth: 118,128.32 LM: +7.55%
Net Worth w/o House: 65,552.32 LM: -3.68%
Net Worth w/o House or IRA: 28,763.82 LM: -12.23%

As of right now, the Net Worth w/o House and Net Worth w/o House or IRA should not vary very much. Considering we are putting ANY extra money that we come up with to the house, the Net Worth number is going to be the only thing that is going to change the most. After we do get rid of the mortgage though, the other numbers will have a bigger impact. The other thing to consider is how I get these numbers. I decide to take the numbers from the 1st of every month. The accounts involved are our checking account, savings account (for small, short term emergencies), Vanguard Money Market Account (for tax payments and longer term emergencies, will also be used to build up our next car purchase and our next house purchase), our Home Equity (assuming our house is worth 95K then subtracting what we owe on the mortgage), and Susan's IRA. Once we do start purchasing more equities, once we finish with the mortgage, I will include other accounts. I'm also thinking about going ahead and breaking down Susan's IRA number into the 3 funds that are actually contained within that account.

Anyway, this has gotten to be a long post. I think I will start talking more and more about our finances and forgetting about posting results from solitaire and poker on here. I will post monthly stats for solitaire, but that is probably about it.

Ideas for next post:

Why we decided to pay off the mortgage instead of investing the money.