Net Worth Update: September 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:
- August 2007 Update
- July 2007 Update
- June 2007 Update
- May 2007 Update
- April 2007 Update
- March 2007 Update
- February 2007 Update
- January 2007 Update
- 2007 Financial Goals
Non-Mortgage Debt
At the beginning of the year I had stated a goal to eliminate all of our non-mortgage debt, which consisted of a 0% balance transfer from American Express that was sitting in our HSBC account.
As you may remember from last month, I’ve acted on a new balance transfer offer from Chase and doubled the amount that I had borrowed from American Express.
It is a little disappointing to see that HSBC, as well as most other online savings options, lowered their rates but that was to be expected. But with a little more than a year before the funds need to be returned, I’ll still earn a nice amount of money.
Increase Net Worth
After two months in a row with a decrease to our net worth, it was important to come back to the positive side in the month of September. Our home improvements are behind us now and everything has been paid, although we need to direct funds back into our eFund.
For the month of September, our net worth increased by 3.67% and that eliminates roughly half of the decline from the previous month. The decision to take money out of savings to pay for our home improvements will make it very difficult to achieve the goal of a 35% increase in our net worth.
Plans for October
October is a relatively quiet month with a few family birthdays and our annual festivities around Halloween. It is amazing that we are already entering the final quarter of the year and the holiday season will be here before we know it. In addition we typically will begin to do a little Christmas shopping towards the end of October and early November.
Our goal for the month of October will be to see another month with an increase to our net worth and I will be shooting to exceed the 3.67% increase from September.
How are you doing with your financial goals?
September was good month for us. Especially considering we had a wedding that cost us 5 airplane tickets, a $1300 camera and other misc things.
October and November will be pretty good then December is when our house taxes and other things are due.
That is good to hear that you still had a good month even with all of those substantial expenses. Our property taxes have all been paid for the year so the only remaining expense on our horizon will be the holidays.