Planning For Wealth

It’s time once again to update our net-worth and chart our progress towards our short term passive income goals.  Before starting to update my spreadsheets I fully expected to see red for October.  I was pleasantly surprised after determining that our net-worth actually grew by $4,636 or 1.48% last month.  Over the last 3 months that means our assets have gained  $25,220 or 8.62%.  All in all this is shaping up to be a pretty good year. 

Our passive income grew by only $8 to $173, or 4.84%.  I’m actually surprised it grew at all.  I haven’t had time to devote to building any passive income streams and our savings interest rate was cut from 5.05% APY to 4.70% APY about half way through the month. 

October was a pretty good month for us.  November will be a different story.  Property taxes are due again and living in Silicon Valley means they with be quite ugly.  We need to pay a large medical bill I’ve been putting off.  We also need to pay the bill for the new refrigerator and stove we bought 6 months ago so we can any finance charges them. 

On the bright side I started a new job 3 weeks ago with a 17% pay raise.  My commute is also about half of what it was before.  Have to drive 21 miles to work now instead of 48 miles.  Once I see what my new take home pay will be my wife and I will need to sit down and rework our family budget.  We’ll finally be able to start contributing regularly to a 529 plan for the kids and setting some cash aside for personal investments, other than my 401k plan and our Roth IRAs. 

September has been a good month for the stock market and our networth.  We managed to show growth across all of our investments this month. Our bottom line shows a net gain $15,341 or about 5.16% for the month.

Our alternate income has only grown by $4 this month or about 2.48%.  No surprise here since I’ve spent maybe 3 hours working on it this month.  I have managed to make $3.28 from Adsense and $3.11 from Amazon Associates.  I’m not including these in my totals until I actually receive payment from them.  Then I’ll average the earnings over the time period it takes to reach the payout threshold.  I’m also looking into ways to expand my aStores and investing the possibility of selling on eBay.

This last month was much kinder to me than July.  Even with how volitile the stock market has been recently I’ve managed to show $5242 increase in our family networth.  At first I was disappointed with this increase.  Then I saw that this equated to a monthly return of 1.79%.  The works out to an annual return of 21.48%.  Adjusting the amounts for the monthly 401K contributions my monthly return was 1.40% or about about 16.80% annually. Neither return is something to complain about.

My alternate income only grew by $7 this month or 4.55%.  I am disappointed with this but not very surprised.  I am still learning how blogs and internet marketing works.  I’m not very good at it but I am learning.  I am also trying to get my wife involved in blogging and doing online stores through Amazon and eBay.  She recently found out she has Celiacs Diesease.  She’s been doing a lot of research on it which would give her a good starting point for a blog and online glutton free store.

I’ve added a simple monthly progress report at the bottom of my goals page.  There’s not much to see currently since I’m only just getting started here. 

The last two weeks the stock market has not been kind to my wife and I.  Our overall net worth has dropped over $12K just from changes in the market value of the securities in our Roth IRAs, 401Ks, and brokerage accounts.  It was nice to see our passive income jump by $18.  That’s a 13.24% increase from the previous month’s income.

That’s not too bad for just putting a few dollar away in savings. Our passive income is currently made up of interest from our emergency and replacements funds plus a small amount of dividends.  In time I’m hoping to include other passive income sources like this blog and various affiliate programs.  At some point I may include my earnings from www.prosper.com.  But for now I am re-investing all the earnings back into prosper to grow my account there.