The goal of this series is to give you a picture of where I’m at, money wise. Part 2 will get into where all of that came from. Yup, you heard it, it’s a net worth post!!
I’m doing this for a few different reasons:
- It’s a lazy post to write, or at least I thought so when planning it out. Seriously, most of this stuff exists on several spreadsheets already. I’m just combining, copy and pasting, and then discussing. There’s some more hardcore emotional posts I should be writing, but I’m not really feeling it right now. Mostly I’m feeling tired. So numbers and blathering about numbers should require less brain stuff or whatever
- I’ve seen a bunch of other people do this, and it’s always interesting to read. In my earlier days along this path to FI, it helped me realize this is doable.
- Speaking of doable, seems like there’s plenty of FI blogs by engineers, tech peeps, and doctors. Few of us blue collar worker dudes. Never seen one by a cop, and most of the military ones are by officer types. So yeah, want to finally have one out on these here internets.
Let’s get to it! For the purposes of this article, I’ll only be going over my stuff, and not my wife’s. Yeah, we’re all combined and stuff, but a good chunk of the next article will be me explaining the deets on how I made the moneys that added up to the net worth. I have a general knowledge of how my wife made her chunk of change, but I’d have to bug her a bunch to get the specifics. Seeing as how she’s sleeping while I write this, I don’t think that would go over well.
If you really care, our combined net worth was at $1,663,343.51 as of Jan 1 when we justified all our accounts on YNAB. That includes our paid off house ($229,900 according to our insurance company’s home value monitoring), and I’m sure the market has changed that number somewhat.
Here’s where I’m at now:
House-Back in the day, I paid off my first house, which I bought for around $95K. Before we were married I charged my wife rent for the last year before I paid it off. I now feel kind of like an asshole for charging that, but there you are. The rent she paid me that year probably totaled about $4200, or $350 a month. We then bought our next house for about $160K. We put a down payment of $60K towards the new house, and got a mortgage for the rest to float until we sold the first house. My wife supplied $15K for the down payment, and I fronted the rest. This seemed fair, as my wife paid for (and planned all herself-Jesus I was fucking asshole. The planning alone was insane and I for sure should have helped out more) our wedding, which she pulled off for about $10K. So really, I would consider my wife’s total contributions to be
$4,200 | Rent from GF, now wife |
$15,000 | Down Payment from wife |
$10,000 | Wife paid for wedding |
$29,200 | Total |
Once the first house sold for about $100k a few months later, we chucked that at the mortgage thus paying that fucker off too. Basically what I’m getting at is I paid for 81.75% of our house, so at current valuation I have $187,943 in my house’s equity that I include in my net worth. Obviously, if my wife finally got tired of my shit (who could blame her, after the above mentioned stupidity on my part?), she’d be getting at least half of the house, but the purpose of this series is to show how I turned my income into what I’ve accumulated, not legal ownership of whatever assets.
Investments- As of Jan 1, my investments totaled $778,859.31. This includes my 457, taxable brokerage account, Roth IRA, I-Bonds, money in a high yield savings account earmarked for a possible syndication deal, crypto, and money I can pull out of my pension contributions when I bounce. I’m not going to break this down on this post, because hell, we’d be here another hour. Just know that about 80% of these investments are in either the S&P 500 or VTSAX, the rest being in bondish assets.
Cash-Holy shit, just looking at this I’ve got $18,053.75 sitting around in a couple of savings accounts. This is my emergency fund, cash I’ve saved up for future spending goals like a new mountain bike, as well as cash I’ve saved for this year’s Roth contribution. I’ve also got $12,234.35 in my HSA. Yeah, I don’t know if the HSA should be added in here, but I’m going to because feels 🙂 Total would be $30,288.10 between all thats. I get the inflation risk of all this cash, but we’ll touch on that in the next category.
Debt-none. I’m putting this category here to make me feel better 😉 We pay off credit cards in full every month, from another checking account I haven’t included here because it’d be hard to split between my wife and I and it’s not that deep. Yes, I understand that debt can be strategically used to one’s advantage, but in case you haven’t noticed, we’re running much of my allocation on feels. Yes, hope is not a plan. But having the ability to live off your investments using a modest safe withdrawal rate even if they’re cut in half is. A good portion of that plan is having an allocation that will allow me to sleep at night (when I don’t wake up screaming for other reasons…).
Total-$997,090.41 Dawww, not quite a mil. Oh well! Considering the next part in this series, I think I’m doing alright. I’m not done earning money yet; my job will keep paying me for like 6 more months while I work the last few and then start burning leave time. Maybe my net worth will inch over that double comma line. Maybe the market will finally take a shit and it’ll be half of that. So it goes.
Where this all came from:
As a cop who pays into a public pension, I’m exempt from making contributions to social security. This made figuring out my total earnings interesting (it also makes my projected social security payments minuscule). Luckily, I was able to pull much of my old cop pay stubs and combine that with what the social security site says I’ve made since I was like 10.
Originally I was going to break all of this income information down in this post, but shit, we’re already over 1000 words here and my attention is waning. So the income history which led to the above net worth will have to wait. Oh the suspense!! Tune in next time to see how much I’ve made for the past few decades, and how that led to the accumulation of all this money stuff.
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