Do any of you look forward to figuring your monthly net worth numbers? I really can’t wait to go through and put everything into my spreadsheet and see how things come out. I used to do it randomly, but that makes it a little harder to see how your improving since fluctuations can vary.

So here’s my net worth for March 2006:

Change vs. previous month: $8,835.73 (4.99%)
% 2006 Goal Complete: 29.4%
% 2030 Goal Complete: 7.4%

Some points of interest for this month’s net worth update:
- Recent Chase 0% offer. This won’t affect my final net worth, but $$$ were shifted around.
- Bonus received in March.
- My big car loan payment hasn’t been made yet, mainly because the process of doing the balance transfer has taken about a month. I plan to get that done in April. I also plan to do my major asset re-allocation in April.
- I didn’t have any major expenses in March.

Upcoming expenses:
- Taxes! Yuck. (~$2000, Federal and State).
- I maybe making an electronics purchase (~$500).
- Airline tickets for a wedding.

If I’m able to maintain an average growth of $8,000 per month, I’ll be able to meet my 2006 goal. I’ll definitely need to start considering what stocks, funds, bonds to invest in with my upcoming asset re-allocation.

Don’t forget to move those hours hands ahead by one hour on Sunday night! At 2am, time magically jumps ahead one hour. Losing one hour of sleep sucks.

Hmmm, well the smoking updates are getting a little old, but yeah, I still haven’t gone back. I’m way past the 21 days mark that SingleMa said would be the official point of having broke the habit…so I’m past it! Woohoo!

I also updated my doggie costs due to some recent food purchases. Which reminds me…Neo has a new blog dedicated to his dog, check it out!

I can’t wait to work on my net worth for this month.

I haven’t had as much time as I would have liked to read other blogs, but I did find one post that contained a lot of financial details…it’s impressive. Thanks Brian and nice work.

Have a great weekend everyone!

So I wrote awhile back on what I thought were my top 5 financial blunders. Well, it’s only fair that I look at what I think were my top 5 financial touchdowns. It was really, really hard to describe 5 specific financial moves.

These are not listed in a particular order. It was hard enough trying to remember them, and then getting enough details to make them substantial enough to write about. In fact I’m still not sure about that…but hey, it’s a start…

- Blogging.
Blogging has helped me focus on the details of my net worth. Tracking net worth itself is great, but without some way to really look at the numbers and wonder why things are the way, you only know the very surface of things. Blogging also has helped gain insight I never would have stumbled across by trying to learn on my own. Read more here.

- Tracking net worth.
It all started with using my former credit union site which had access to Yodlee’s My Worth service. It tracked my net worth automatically. Knowing my net worth really makes me consider things like whether my next purchase is “worth it,” or why is my net worth not increasing as much as it should? Without an understanding of where you are at the moment, it becomes very difficult to identify where you are headed.

- Getting a job during high school.
Getting a job as soon as I can probably gave me a real sense of what it is to earn money. Of course chores had the same effect, actually getting a paycheck, being able to plan and figure out what to do with the money I earned helped me become more responsible. I think.

- Getting credit cards from a young age.
I have a long credit history…goes back almost 10 years. Not to mention, credit cards taught me to really hate debt. I could see credit cards easily turning into one of my top 5 mistakes as well though.

- College: Attending my state public university rather than a private university.
Probably the single most important decision I made. I attended private school from K - 12, thanks mom and dad, but when it came to college, I decided to go to my local state university. Which choice would you have made?

In my senior year of high school, I was faced with one of the single, most important decisions of my life, where to go to college–a local state university plus full scholarship or ivy league university with no financial aid. No matter how much I tried to contemplate what would have happened if I made the other decision, I’ll never know for sure.

Read the rest of this entry »

PFBlog’s blog recently wrote up an article: Some Sanity is Needed, Upcoming Contest, and it brought up some interesting thoughts/feelings and a chance for me to reflect on my reasons for blogging.

I guess you could categorize me as a longtime Internet user, but not a long time blogger…I’m a lurker. Since the early days of bulletin boards and dial up, I’ve been lurking and searching for the end of the Internet. I’ve never been one to fear buying things online, actually I doubt a majority of the folks blogging and reading finance blogs are even though I did see a recent survey that indicated the majority of the population still has some hesitation of online commerce. Sorry, went off on a tangent…So anyway, I really wanted to find an answer to this question, “At my age, how am I doing financially?” Better? Worse? Average? One site my searching led me to was bestcashcow.com. But I kept searching…keywords: “my net worth,” which led me to freemoneyfinance.com. And thus, my interest of blogging began…

I never knew a world of personal net worth tables and Moneysmartz’ bnwi existed! Holy crap, abc is worth how much?!?! How the hell does xyz have that much debt?!?! Hmmm, how am I doing? I found myself itching for the next net worth update of people I didn’t even know.

Eventually I realized I should be contributing too. So I started blogging…because I had lots of quirks related to money that I did for myself, why not write it down…Maybe other people could gain from it? And to be honest, for the longest time I yearned an avenue where I could write about money–my money, to be criticized by others and to find areas where I could improve. And blogging sure has helped me…from deciding to pay down my debt, to quitting the cancer sticks, to looking at my asset allocations, to seeing if my exuberance for a national sales tax had some merit, to figuring out what was really going in and out of my bank accounts…and why. Blogging really helps me manage my finances better, and thus I blog. At the same time, if it helps someone else, then it becomes that much better. So why do you blog?

EDIT: I should add, it definitely is nice to have readers though…Can’t lie about that :), and I appreciate it.

EDIT EDIT: I really had to take that line out because it bothered me.

Image Credit:  http://www.blessed2bless.us/

Well, I finished my taxes a couple days ago. I have to make payments in April…Well, I guess that means a temporary dip in the net worth chart.

Here are the tax percentages I paid in 2005:

Federal: 17.3%
State: 6.7%

Dang, I wish I could my tax rate under 10%…I need to have kids or go to school!

I’ve been feeling a little under the weather as of late, so I’m not sure how much blogging I’ll do. Thanks for reading!

Continuing on part 2…

Imagine no income tax, no more waiting for W2s and trying to figure out how many allowable exemptions to take this year, no more giving the government an interest free loan, and imagine saving tax free…That’s what started this series, but now it’s time for a deeper look.

What would be a reasonable “tax rate”? I’m thinking about 10-20% would be a ballpark figure of what I would expect to pay. I did some digging to try and find out, what if we really switched to a national sales tax? Well, I found some info at www.taxpolicycenter.org that listed Total US Income tax collected in 2003.

Total US Income Tax (2003): $1,683,184,679,000 (reference)

Then I needed to find some data on how much sales is done in the US that would be subject to the national sales tax. So I looked up retail sales information for 2003. On a side note, in my search I noticed everyone talks about percent increases in consumer spending, but no $$$ figure to go with it! But I finally found some data at census.gov.

Total US Retail Sales (2003, not seasonally adjusted, reference): $3,275,407,000,000.

Wait, wait, wait…If you noticed and said, “OMG, I have to pay 50% tax??!?!” Hold on for a sec. Be sure you consider the whole picture…

1. You no longer have federal income tax being witheld from your paychecks! That’s a big boost each pay period.
2. Tax credits would still be given depending on your exemptions.
3. Retail sales data above might not be complete.
4. Government can always get more budget conscious. (ha!)

So if the US Census Retail Sales data is accurate, then $3.3 trillion would be taxed, which would mean a fifty percent tax! Could you imagine?? Is it worth it? I don’t know. It would definitely get me spending less and saving more.

Some odditities I found while searching for total US Retail Sales data…This other site reported annual retail sales in 2003 in the US of $59 trillion! That’s a huge difference compared to the $3.2 trillion reported by the census. Although, $59 trillion sounds a little un-realistic. That would mean a national sales tax rate of 3%. So what’s the real number? Beats me! But it would make a huge difference in whether people would support a drastic change like national sales tax.

Another issue, what would happen to retirement accounts? Tax free would certainly lose its appeal.

When I first started this series on national sales tax, I was all for it. After seeing the possible $$$ figures, I still am. It would get tourists, tax evaders, and immigrants all contributing to the country they are visiting or living in, and that sounds fair to me. I do have some concerns, but when you look at the concept in its fundamental state, it makes sense. This is the reason I believe it would work…Not to mention all the lost productivity due to hours of brain mangling tax work can now be spent freely. How do you put a monetary value on that?

If you haven’t heard about this plan, you should read about it. Found this in a forum I read, on the topic of financials and retirement…quite educational and definitely something to think about

If you had purchased $1000.00 of Nortel stock one year go, it would now be worth $49.00.

With Enron, you would have had $16.50 left of the original $1,000.00.

With WorldCom, you would have had less than $5.00 left.

But, if you had purchased $1,000.00 worth of beer one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling REFUND,you would have had $214.00.

Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.

It’s called the 401-Keg Plan.

I’m not sure how accurate the numbers are, but oh well that’s not the point! And that’s why I have my disclaimer at the bottom on this page. LOL. Have an awesome weekend!

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