Wednesday, July 08, 2009

June 09 Net Worth and Expense Recap

June wasn't too bad a month-- my net worth increased despite the stock market not being all that great. I'm now at approximately $352,752, an increase of 1.6% from last month. Here's how it divides out. (The figure for Bonds is not up to date, as I haven't visited the Treasury Direct website lately to check on it due to their very complicated log-in process!)

Cash & Bank Accounts $47,778
Retirement Accounts $193,812
Bonds $4,860
Stocks/Mutual Funds $13,677
Home Equity $94,311
Credit Cards ($1,686)


As for expenses, this month I thought I'd do a January-June comparison vs. last year instead of the monthly details.


Jan-Jun '08 Jan-Jun '09 % var
Income


Bonus $15,187 $11,765 -23%
Gift Received $100 $944 844%
Interest Inc $605 $428 -29%
Other Inc $5,294 $5,541 5%
Salary $46,500 $48,103 3%
Tax Refund $6,024 $4,211 -30%
TOTAL $73,710 $70,992 -4%




Expenses


Bank Charge $51 $70 39%
Charity $231 $261 13%
Clothing $1,778 $1,317 -26%
Dining $4,305 $4,079 -5%
Education $249 $195 -21%
Entertainment $104 $330 218%
Gifts Given $997 -$218 -122%
Household $867 $757 -13%
Housing $7,454 $10,403 40%
Medical $1,001 $708 -29%
Misc $3,834 $1,415 -63%
Taxes Deducted $17,865 $16,874 -6%
Recreation $13 $0 -100%
Subscriptions $443 $461 4%
Travel $9,206 $479 -95%
Utilities $1,041 $984 -5%
TOTAL $49,437 $38,116 -23%


A few notes on the above:
Income was down mainly due to my bonus being lower, and a smaller tax refund, which resulted from lower withholding kicking in.

Gifts Received was high due to an attempt from my mother to advance my sister and me some inheritance!

Interest income is down because interest rates are down.

Dining is a bit skewed due to some stocking up on wine, but aside from that, I was pleased to see a nice decrease here due to buying less breakfast food in delis as opposed to bringing it from home. I also ate dinner in restaurants a bit less, I think-- the only complication here is that Sweetie and I often alternate paying for things, so sometimes one of us buys the groceries in exchange for the other paying for a restaurant meal. This makes it a bit more difficult to track how I'm actually spending my food budget.

Entertainment is way up due to the tennis tickets with Mortimer.

Gifts Given was really high last year because I bought my mother a plane ticket, and really low this year because I returned a lot of Christmas presents that I ended up not needing to give people.

Housing isn't really up that much, it's just that a tax refund hit during this period last year.

Medical was higher than usual last year due to a lot of shots needed for my trip to Africa.

Miscellaneous was high last year because I bought a new computer.

Travel was way high last year, again due to the Africa trip. No vacation travel yet this year, and nothing major on the horizon! And yes, I swear I will finish the post about that trip someday, maybe on its one-year anniversary!

Utilities are down because I'm not home as much and therefore using less gas and electricity.


All in all, the net results are good: I made less money, but I saved more money. Averaged out, my savings this year were about $5,479 per month total. Even if you just look at my expenses vs. salary YTD, I saved about 21% of my gross pay-- and bonus, interest income, etc is all gravy on top of that. That number makes me feel a lot better about surviving a tough economy. Onwards and upwards!

5 comments:

Gord said...

I hope that your new computer is a tax deduction. You make some money from the blog, I assume. So any expense associated with making that money should be deductible. At least it is here in Canada. I'm sure you must know that.

I am surprised your savings and retirement accounts are so high when you must still have a significant mortgage balance. The yield from paying off a mortgage is almost always higher than saving and investment accounts. Can you tell us what the thought processes are and why you're doing things this way?

Wayne said...

In regards to the Treasury Direct website, yes, it is a pain to log in to check. You can do one of the following,
1) download the savings bond wizard app from them which keeps record of all your bonds and updates it monthly. you will have to input all of your bonds into the app.
2) if you use Yodlee or Mint.com, you can set it up to connect to your account and get your information about the worth of your bonds provided you have bonds you purchased or converted to online with them.

Boston Gal said...

Hi Madame X,

I have to second Wayne's suggestion of investing some time to downloading and logging in your bonds into the Savings Bond Wizard desktop application (link to page on the treasury website). I did this a number of years ago and now every month I just open the app and it updates my values for me (once a year or so I have to hit update to refresh with the latest yield data - but that is a painless few moments of time). Well worth the effort. I like the client application since it sits on my desktop and I know the data is secure. It also has additional reports that lets you see how much each bond is earning year-to-date, etc. As well as how much they have earned since purchase - so some nice number crunching data to play with.

Otherwise this update looks like you are doing very well given what a challenging economic year we are having. Great job!

Kasey at Thrifty Little Blog said...

Thanks for being so open with your finances. I think it is really helpful to see how others use money.

FINACE said...

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