Life's gotten the better of my blogging over the last couple of weeks, but I've still been keeping an eye on my net worth (if not controlling it as closely as I'd like). I've made a couple of big decisions that will likely affect my financial life in the next couple of years, but more on that later. For now, just the standard garden-variety net worth update.
The good news is even without being too careful, I'm still up just short of $1000 this month. It would have been more, but I decided to downgrade my car from "Excellent" to "Clean" condition because it ended up going off-roading a little during a recent camping trip. I'm pretty sure it's fine, but Jettas aren't really designed to off-road, so I decided to take that hit. It's about $400, but I guess I have a car so I can drive it, not stare at it and wonder how much it'll sell for. I'll do better financially by driving it to the ground than selling it anyway (not that I won't need to take good care of it for that).
The stock market kept taking a hit, so the $100 gained there is sadly just the part of my contributions that wasn't eaten by losses. Other than that, I spent a little more than I would have liked, and kept plugging away at my debt. I'm thinking about starting up a few new 0% balance transfers within the coming months, but I won't track those in my net worth.
Goals for September are pretty simple. I think I'm going to try to go out to lunch not more than once during the week and curb extra spending. Somehow a ton of my friends were born in November, so that always ends up being an expensive month for me and I'll need to build up a cushion for that and my own birthday in January (not to mention the braces, and my other plans mentioned above).
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4 comments:
When I was looking at your networth, I noticed you have a lot of cash assets. Why don't you pay off your car loan? Just a question...
I could pay off my car loan, my student loan, and my credit card, but they're at 1.9%, 2.6%, and 2.9% for the life of the balance respectively and my cash assets are making 5.05 - 5.3% in various high yield savings accounts. That's why I choose to keep the debt around. Some days it's very tempting to just press that 'pay off' button and be done with the debt once and for all, but because of the low interest rates I don't think that'd be the best decision for now.
I've also put some thought into investing more of that cash, but right now it looks like I have some fairly short term goals (1-3 years) that I'll need to spend a lot of it on, so any sort of risky investment is probably out of the question.
I agree that you shouldn't rush to pay off those debts since you've secured such low interest rates on those balances, but you should consider some index-linked CDs. You can find some that only lock up the money 3-5 years with minimums of $10,000.
How'd you get such low interest rates on your various loans if you don't mind me asking? Most of my friends with loans are paying around 4-5%.
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