Net Worth, April 2016

Last year wasn’t a good year for my net worth.  It came with a $7000 drop.

Q1 2016, however, was a great quarter.

In December, we had $13,271 in credit card debt.   At the time I took this screenshot, it was down to $3836.43.    As of this moment, it’s down to $2640.91.   If things go as expected this week, I should wake up on Friday to a paid-off credit card.  I had to raid some of our savings accounts to make it happen, but it’s happening.    Some of it was a tax refund, some of it was the fact that my mortgage payment went away in December.

That’s seven years of hard work, almost to the day.   Seven years ago, I was researching bankruptcy, and stumbled across Dave Ramsey.    Seven years ago, we were drowning in debt.

Next week, we’re free.   No more debt, hanging over our heads.   We’re free to take vacations.   We’re free to finally save for college, when my son is 16, and stand a chance of being able to pay for it for him.   We’re free to do…whatever we want to do.   Our monthly nut after the debt is paid–only in fall/winter/spring when my wife is working–is roughly 1/3 of our take-home pay.

That’s how hard we’ve cut to make sure we can pay our bills and make debt die.  We do have some things that would be considered extravagant.   We’re not savages.   But my car is 10 years old.  My wife’s is 7.   My motorcycles are 35 and 30; one of them was purchased before we cared about our debt.

Back to the net worth….

The biggest change came from our property values, which sucks.  That was $36,000 of the difference, which comes with the painful tax bump to go with it.   A large chunk of the savings increase was the money we set aside every month to cover the property tax bill, and that will go away next month.

Still, $641,000 dollars is a long way from nothing.   I’m pretty happy.