The Sun’s Financial Diary

What used to make us, now broke us.
For a third time in a row, our paper fortune dropped after the broad market suffered deep decline in the first month of 2008. Our calculation showed that at the end of January 2008, our net worth, excluding house and vehicle related items, was at $551,521, down [...]

When I posted our total passive income in 2007 in the middle of the month, one item missing from the calculation was interests earned from our purchases of 4-week T-bills in the first half of the year. Though I can go through all the transactions and figure out myself how much I have made, it [...]

One of the objectives we have is to generate incomes, dividends and capital gains, from our investments and hope one day these what I called passive incomes will replace the major part of our salaries before tapping into savings in our tax deferred accounts. In 2007, we continued to make progress in growing this part [...]

This is the third part of our Year End Review, in which I have so far gone through financial moves we made in 2007 and how what we have done affected our net worth, which includes both new money and price appreciation of our existing investments. The latter is the subject of this part [...]

This is the second part of my 2007 Year End Reviews. In the first part, I took a look at the financial moves we made last year. Now I want to see how what we did put where we are in the new year.
December 2007 update
Our net worth saw second consecutive monthly decline in December [...]

As we are approaching the finial day of 2007, I feel it’s time to look back and examine what we have done in the last year that could affect us financially, both in the short- and long-term, as I did at the end of 2006. Since we didn’t make any official goals [...]

It’s that time again and what I am looking at is not pretty, as expected.
November turned out to be a very tough month for investors as both the S&P and the Dow had the biggest monthly decline in five years. Despite the second rate cut by the Fed in as many months, concerns over subprime [...]

The Federal Reserve gave investors a Halloween treat yesterday by cutting the key lending rate a quarter-percentage point. The second rate cut in two months gave the stock markets a boost, pushing major indices up more than 1% Wednesday to finish the month on a strong note. For the month, the Dow gained 0.3% to [...]

When the stock markets had the best September in 34 years, it’s hard not to make money, big money and that was indeed what happened to us last month. In fact, we saw so far the biggest jump in our net worth since I started the tracking in August 2006. For the month, the Dow [...]

I just realized that I have been tracking the growth of our net worth for more than a year already. One year ago today, we had a total of $369,550 without including house and car related items. Here’s a picture of our net worth at the end of August 2006.

How are we doing one year [...]