The Sun's Financial Diary

How was your Labor Day long weekend? Did you enjoy the last holiday of the summer?
For us, the past three days were probably the busiest and crazies days in a long time (and that’s why I didn’t post anything since Saturday).
Ever since we decided to move to Virginia because of my wife’s job change, we [...]

Another good month is in the books. Though the August performance isn’t as good as July, it’s still good enough to push our net worth to another all-time high, which is pretty exciting. The gain in August is the sixth in a row since March. Comparing to the returns of the stock market last month [...]

I think this describes the best how we feel right now, but it’s all good.
Our agent says “Things are heating up!” and they really are.
This time last week, we were worried that we may have to leave our house on the market, hoping either to sell it if we are lucky or rent it out [...]

That’s the good news . The bad news is the final price, after all the costs and cashback (no including the upgrade we did), is likely to be lower than the price we paid 5 years ago when we bought the house . But in this environment, we are still happy [...]

I should have done this last month for the mid-year checkup, but didn’t get time to record all the data and I had to delay the update to this month.
In the past, I have reviewed our investments, mainly taxable stock and mutual fund investment. The reason I skipped retirement investments before is that some of [...]

Our house has been on the market for nearly two months already and we still don’t have a buyer. Things were looking pretty good when we received an offer in the third week. However, it failed to go through as we were not able to reach an agreement with the potential buyer, even though we [...]

What a difference one month has made!
Given how much better the overall stock market has performed in July (the Dow up 8.6%, the S&P 7.4%, and the Nasdaq 7.8%), I expected a good month for our net worth. However, I am very surprised, and pleased, after finishing the calculation that not only it increased [...]

After three straight months of robust growth of our net worth, which added a total of $148,420.12 to our paper wealth, the gain in June was a little disappointing. Nonetheless, I am still very happy to see that the positive trend has been extended into the forth month, even though the stock market didn’t exactly [...]

Today is my first day at this new job.
The job is from the second employer that I was interviewed a few weeks ago. It’s a division of  the same employer who offered my very first job 9 years ago and does business mostly with the government. I got offers from the first two employers rather [...]

After some delay, we finally put our house on the market.
This afternoon, we called one of the agents we talked with before and signed all the paperwork with him so we can get the process started.  Originally, the plan was to list the house at the beginning of the month, but now it’s the middle [...]