Net Worth Update: July 2007

by mnc · Published August 1, 2007 · Updated September 1, 2007

As a means of tracking my progress towards my 2007 goals, I am going to be running this as an on-going series of posts. As a bit of background, here are the opening posts in the series:

Non-Mortgage Debt
My original plan was to eliminate all of our non-mortgage debt by the end of 2007. As a reminder, the only non-mortgage debt that we have is the 0% balance transfer from American Express that is deposited in our HSBC account.

As I mentioned last month, I have been receiving some attractive offers for new 0% balance transfers and one offer is extended through February of 2009.

Unfortunately, I have called each of the companies regarding their offer and none of them are willing to deposit funds directly to my checking account.

Initially I had planned to just forget about the additional balance transfers due to that limitation but now I am thinking of just transferring the balance at American Express over to one of the new offers. I’m still not decided on this approach but it is under consideration.

In 2007 we have reduced our non-mortgage debt by 47.92% as we had paid off a previous balance transfer and have been making consistent payments on the AmEx balance transfer. The 0% balance transfer at American Express only has a few months remaining so we will either pay it off completely or roll that over to one of the new offers. If we select to roll it over, we will not be meeting this goal as the funds would remain at HSBC until the teaser rate expires.

Increase Net Worth
Ugh! Things were looking okay until the last week of July when the S&P 500 dropped by nearly 5% after July 23rd. For the first time this year I have had a decline in my net worth.

For the month of July, our net worth declined by 0.32% and much of that took place in the last week of the month. It’s disappointing to see but given the overall decline of the market I think we did fairly well. This brings the growth of our net worth to 20.15% since the beginning of the year.

The last few months have given me cause for concern as to whether or not we will reach our goal of increasing our net worth by 35% but I believe we can still do it.

Plans for August
Last month I had mentioned that we were going to be making the final payments on our windows and we did, although I discovered that I could use my rewards credit card to make the payment. Therefore the payment will not officially be made until our August statement is due for that credit card, which we pay off in full every month.

August will bring a close to the summer as our kids head back to school. In addition, my wife will be resuming her job once the kids are back to school so there will soon be an additional source of income. We’re still looking to get away for an extended weekend before school resumes but our schedule is so full that it may be difficult.

While I am a little bummed to have taken a step backwards in July, I realize that there are times when you need to take a step backwards before you can resume moving forward. The year has been flying by and I hope that everyone else is doing well on the progress towards their goals!