October 2011 Personal Net Worth

The big thing you’ll notice about this month’s net worth update is the increase across the board across all equity (stocks) related accounts. Net worth can rise and fall pretty quickly if you’ve got a significant portion of your financial portfolio in stocks like me. I’m young, I don’t mind it. The previous three months have been pretty tough (saw negative returns) so this month is a welcomed change, with all accounts rising an average of 7%.

Property Taxes – As you know, we pay our own property taxes (we don’t escrow) and so we have to save this ourselves. We create multiple savings accounts with Capital One 360 and each month I manually transfer $350 over to this account. I just received our two property tax statements (one for the school district and the other for the county and city) and the total is around $4,200. So, the November transfer should get us to where we need to be for the year. Our property tax statements are showing home value numbers that are about $7K higher than what Zillow.com shows (the number I use in my networth calculation), so I may consider appealing my property taxes to get them to the correct number.

Cars – This month, since it’s a new quarter, I went to Edmunds.com and recalculated the value of our cars. If you want to do this for your own cars you should first navigate to Edmunds.com, then:

• Click the “Used Cars” Tab
• Find the “Appraise a Used Car” Box
• Select the Make, Model, Year, and Zip Code
• Click “Appraise It”
• Click the “Appraise Your Car” Button below the TMV Number
• Further Refine the Value by Mileage, Condition, Color, etc.
• Click Get Pricing Report and Choose Your Value: Trade-In, Private Sale, etc.

I use the trade-in number just to be conservative.

This month we are going to look further into selling our SUV (car #1) and using that cash towards a more solid down payment on our next house.

Note: If this is your first time seeing my net worth, you should know that the credit card balance gets paid off each month in full. The number in that row is the amount that’s on the bill for me to pay off.

So that does it for this month’s update. Nothing terribly exciting, but it’s always good to see the net worth rise.