Net Worth Update: August 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
As we entered the year, our only non-mortgage debt was a 0% balance transfer from American Express that was sitting in our HSBC account.

The plan was to pay a set amount each month and then make the final payment before the teaser rate was set to expire. Well, I’ve taken a detour with this plan and will not be eliminating the non-mortgage debt by the end of the year.

Last month I had talked about a few new balance transfer offers that were rather appealing and I decided to act on one of them.

With an offer from Chase, I’ve transfered the remaining balance from American Express over and took an additional sum that will be added to our HSBC account. This new offer came with no balance transfer fees and the rate is good until October 2008.

There was one hurdle with this offer as Chase would not allow me to deposit funds into my checking account. To get around this issue, I had them send an amount over to one of my cards that had a $0.00 balance, essentially resulting in a large credit balance on that card. I then called them to have a check cut to me for my credit balance. It took a few extra days to go this route so I will miss a little bit of interest.

In 2007 we have now actually increased our non-mortgage debt by 4.15% since I requested a larger amount with this latest balance transfer. Since the new 0% balance transfer offer with Chase does not expire until October 2008, I will continue to make regular payments that meet the minimum required payment but will not repay the entire balance until next year.

Increase Net Worth
This month our net worth took a dive down because we decided to tap into our emergency savings to cover the cost of a few home improvements.

The reason that we decided to pay for the home improvements out of our e-Fund was because the convenience of the timing was more important to us than saving the additional funds until March of next year. Now we will direct those funds back into our savings to have the e-Fund fully replenished by March.

For the month of August, our net worth declined by 6.83% and that puts a dent into our overall progress for the year. This decline may make it difficult to reach our goal of increasing our net worth by 35% but with all of the home improvements checked off, the kids back in school and my wife back at work we should be able to save a little more aggressively.

Plans for September
With fall quickly approaching, we don’t have too many things on the schedule. September will bring my birthday and the beginning of football season. The kids will be busy with homework as well as the fall league of baseball and skateboarding lessons.

I have a feeling that the last few months of the year are going to be a blur so hopefully September will bring some time to sit back and relax before our schedule gets a little more hectic. The goal for September will be to have an increase to our net worth as the last two months have seen a decrease and we need to get back on track.

Hope everyone is doing well with their annual goals!

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2 Responses

  1. Nick says:

    Don’t the home improvements increase the value of your house and thus at least not decrease from your overall net worth?

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