November 2007 Financial Status

November 21, 2007

So here’s my first posting of my financial status, going along with my goal to be accountable to myself. Just posting this really forced me to take a hard look at where I am. At first glance, I can see that really the only thing that’s keeping my net worth positive is the value of my house, which is kinda sad.

Honestly I wasn’t sure if I should even include it, because for some reason, so many other PF bloggers don’t list it. But I did anyway, since I have debt against it, and if I sold it, I would some out on the positive end. Maybe the reason the others don’t include it is because they rent, or just want to track their cash and investment accounts only, as described here by nickel at fivecentnickel.com, but lately nickel seems to be reconsidering.

If I only tracked investement accounts and non-mortgage debt, I’d definitely be negative, so I think I’ll do it this way for a while if only for the fact that it makes me feel better right now. Otherwise I’d have a crushing feeling that I’m way behind. Ok, I still have the crushing feeling. I used Excel, because I haven’t really played with Quicken’s net worth feature yet.

A couple of notes, to get a somewhat reasonable home value, I chose to get it from zillow.com which seemed right in line with what I thought. I also pulled my car values from kbb.com, choosing the private party sale in good condition options. Why include car values? Well again, if I needed to sell them, it would put cash in my pocket so I consider them to have value, even though I have a loan against one. Thankfully I’m not upside down on it.

You’ll notice that I didn’t include any cash savings numbers, mainly because I don’t have any worth talking about. It varies based on the time of the month, and it never really accumulates, so I’m choosing not to include it. I’m also not including a 529 plan for my son, which has a small balance.

I still haven’t made any specific plans or goals for retirement yet. The only real goal I have right now is to get rid of my consumer debt, which adds up to be about 25K including my car loan. However, I think I’ll just focus on the credit cards and medical bills right now and really try to be aggressive with them.

Posted in Financial Status Updates