No More Monthly Net Worth Update

One of the reasons that I started this blog in the summer of 2006 was as a tool to track our progress towards financial freedom, even though I never knew exactly how much is needed to get that freedom. It’s kind of like a moving target because nobody can really predict what things will be like in 20 or 30 year. But it has always been “The more the better”. And that, earn more, save more, and invest more, actually has become my goal.

Since the first post in September 2006, one of the topics that appeared every month was the monthly update of our net worth. In addition to track the overall number, I also broke it down into categories (such as credit card balance, cash savings, taxable account investments, retirement account investments, and 529 college savings, etc.) and explained how the numbers changed from month to month. For the past three and a half years, we saw our number more than doubled, from a little over $350K in August 2006 to nearly $1M in March 2010, the last time when I posted an update. Though our combined income, from both our day jobs and the side business, has increased quite significantly during the same period of time, I attribute most of the increase to gains in our investments, which I started in 2001 when we had only one income. Throughout these years, we had ups and downs in our jobs, but we had never stopped investing. As long as we could afford it, we always set aside the money to invest in stocks and mutual funds, usually through automatic investment plans. If anyone asks me how we grew our net worth from about $200K at the end of 2002 to where we are now, my answer is “Start investing as early as possible and keep investing through good time and bad.”

The reason that I decided to stop posting monthly update here isn’t because that I have lost interest in tracking our net worth after all these years. No, I am still doing it every month and still enjoying charts like the one above. Rather, I feel that the constant updates probably don’t mean anything to those readers who read a post that was made out of a template every month, except to me. For this, I guess maybe it’s better to keep it to myself.

While the monthly update has stopped, I will continue to share our investments which have been the driving force for our net worth growth. And once in a while, I may still provide a brief update of where we are at the time just for the record, but no more monthly post.

BTW, one last update. The sharp drop in our net worth last month was due to 1) the 30% down payment we put for the house, 2) $20K spent on house (upgrade and furniture), and 3) a big tax bill last month.