Dang, can’t believe it’s time to update my Net Worth again.  My apologies to the three of you who actually find these updates interesting and have been waiting for it. Let’s get right to business.

A$$ets:

Checking Account: $4,487; (change not shown since money is constantly in and out of this account). For the first time EVER, my landlord finally deposited our rent check within a week of receiving it. Usually it takes him at least 30, sometimes 45 days to get around to it. Life is much less stressful when your accounts accurately reflect what you have.

Savings Accounts: $62,690; +$2,401. Saw my first paycheck that included the mandatory overtime I have to work while I am in Korea (two more weeks) Working longer days sucks. Making more money doesn’t. I’d probably shoot myself in the elbow though if I was working 50+hour weeks every week. I respect you workaholics.

Roth IRA: $27,913; +$2,159. Finally making some headway in the retirement accounts. I wouldn’t be upset if this trend decided to continue on for a few more months. It’s crazy to think that within a 30 day time frame I can literally make $2,000 without lifting a finger. Of course, I can also lose that much in just as quick.

TSP (401K): $30,398; +$3,157. Upping my 401K contributions from 5% to 8% couldn’t have come at a better time. Just caught the recent uptick. $1,000 of this growth was put there by myself and my employer. The other $2,157 was Wall Street. I invest like a boss

Liabilities

Credit Card: $1,562 (change not reflected since balance is paid off each month). I can’t even remember the last time our credit card balance was under $2,000 for a month. It’s like a huge weight as been lifted from our shoulders. Never thought I’d say this, but for the first time I’m actually looking forward to paying this bill. 

How’s that one song go again? You know the one about moving? Oh, that’s right. MOVING ON UP (moving on up). Adding up all those beautiful increases above gives us a total net worth of  $123,927.  That’s up $9,303 from last month, which in case you couldn’t tell, makes me a VERY HAPPY CAMPER! Life is good right now, let’s see how long it can last

Did the market give your NW a healthy bump last month?

You can see all of my net worth updates here.

No better way to ring in the new year then by giving you guys a Net Worth update right? Twenty Eleven was great to the Ninja household. Our NW rose a little over $45,000 during the last twelve months. While we are definitely hoping 2012 is good to us, we’d be foolish to think this year is going to be equally awesome (in 2011 GN had a higher paying job, we lived rent free for four months, etc). Maybe we don’t make huge gains every month, but as long as we make some serious progress towards our goals, I’ll be a happy camper. Let’s get on with it, shall we?

A$$ets:

Checking Account: $4,188; (change not shown since money is constantly in and out of this account). Wrote a check for a pretty substantial charitable contribution last month, but am yet to see the thing clear. Our landlord has also gotten in the habit of cashing our rent checks three to four weeks after he gets them. Checks are annoying because people don’t cash them. Wish I could pay my rent on a Credit Card.

Savings Accounts: $60,289; +$1,497. We hoarded cash like it was going out of style in the early part of 2011. Over the last six months, we haven’t been as good about making progress towards our $100,000 savings goal. Would like to be throwing more like $2,000 to $3,000 in this account each month.

Roth IRA: $25,754; +$389. My 2011 annual gains in this account were nonexistent. In fact I lost a few hundred bucks over the course of the year. I’ll still be a diligent little Ninja and continue maxing out my Roth every year I can. One day this account is going to make me rich, right now it just makes me frustrated. Haha.

TSP (401K): $27,241; +$1,062. I contributed about $700 to this account (including the match) and the markets added another $362 to it’s performance. I’ve upped my 401K contributions from 5% to 8% in hopes of building this sucker up even faster than originally planned.

Liabilities

Student Loan: $0. Okay I’ve been debt free for over a year and a half now. Thinking this will be the last NW update I include Sallie Mae’s zero balance in my liabilities section. Say your final goodbyes to Sallie Mae, because I’m burying her once and for all

Credit Card: $2,850 (change not reflected since balance is paid off each month). Ah the joys of Christmas shopping. We spent a little over $1,000 on gifts for the family this year, which was expected. Nothing else too sexy goes on with this account. Just the normal grocery shopping, household expenses, etc. But hey, at least we are earning airline miles while doing it.

My favorite months are the ones where my Savings, Roth, and 401K all show a green balance after them because that means our most important accounts increased in value. As you can see, they did just that last month. This my friends is a very good thing. In total, we added another $4,025 to our net worth, bringing our new total to $114,624.

Do you expect 2012 to be more or less favorable to your NW than 2011 was?

You can see all of my net worth updates here.

During one of my Net Worth updates  a few months back, one of you made a comment along the lines of  “I don’t like to calculate my NW. I am more valuable than a number.”

I get that. No one is saying that your net worth defines the very essence of your character. But that doesn’t mean your net worth isn’t important. 

I post my net worth updates each month as a way to track my progress over the years. What I don’t want people doing, including you, is comparing your net worth to mine. You have a different income, different living situation, and different priorities than me. Who cares if my net worth went up more than yours, or if yours went up more than mine? As long as we are doing the best we can with the cards we’ve been dealt, nothing else matters.

Heck, we may not even have the same definition of Net Worth. You can see from my monthly updates I include the following items in our calculation:

1. Checking Accounts
2. Savings Accounts
3. Roth IRA
4. 401K
5. Credit Card balance

That’s it. It usually only takes me a few minutes to crunch the numbers and see where we stand. This, however, might not be the most accurate reflection of our true net worth. For example, I have $5,000 sitting in a blogging account that I’ve ignored all year. Why? Because I know Girl Ninja and I are facing a huge tax bill this year and I will be giving all that money to Uncle Sam here in the next few months.

Or how about our cars. My car is worth around $11,000 and the wifey’s should sell for around $8,000. We owe nothing on them, so including these figures in our totals would give our NW a healthy bump by nearly $20,000.

Girl Ninja also has a retirement account set up through the San Diego School District that we have totally ignored (I’m really lazy and haven’t filled out the necessary paperwork to have it rolled to a private IRA). I think there’s about $3,000 in that account that I could include in our net worth, but until I’ve actually done my due diligence and rolled that sucker over, it’s like it doesn’t exist.

Lastly, if we wanted to be super intense, we could itemize all of our possessions and guesstimate their value.  Laptop $300, TV $600, Couch $1,000, etc. That sounds way to tedious and miserable for me to ever sit down and actually figure out, so I’ll just take a shot-in-the-dark and assume we have about $5,000 in miscellaneous possessions.

Moral of the story:

My NW updates are a quick way to see if GN and I are making good (or bad) progress towards our financial goals. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s definitely not the most accurate systems, but it works great for us.

Do you calculate your net worth semi-regularly? If so, what accounts/items do you include in your calculation? Is there anything you leave out of your NW, but you could include if you wanted?

p.s. I’ve posted this comic before, but it’s just too good to not repost today…

The holidays are upon us and that means our net worth increases will likely be hindered. The markets had a good run last week so that’s helped us out a bit, but not enough to bring us in the black. Some months are good, others, bad, and this one was mediocre. Let’s get on with it…

A$$ets:

Checking Account: $3,485; (change not shown since money is constantly in and out of this account). Checking accounts are pretty boring. Nothing more to say about that.

Savings Accounts: $58,792; +$1,811. Any gain in our savings account puts us another dollar closer to our $100,000 savings goal. Can’t even imagine what it will feel like when/if we make it there. Maybe like a million unicorns singing “we are the champions” as I’m getting a 60 minute back massage from Tinkerbell? Yeah exactly like that.

Roth IRA: $25,365; -$302. Even with the markets up some 7% last week I still couldn’t pull ahead for the month. One of these days this Roth IRA thing of mine is going to actually make me some money. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

TSP (401K): $26,179; -$287. Seven hundred dollars contributed, four hundred dollars lost Blah.

Liabilities

Student Loan: $0. HahahahahahahHahHhHahahahaha. Hate you Sallie Mae.

Credit Card: $3,237(change not reflected since balance gets paid off). Dropping some mad cash like its going out of style. Airfare, some necessary (and unnecessary) shopping trips, and other random expenses makes for one gnarly credit card bill. Fortunately we can pay this sucker off each month. If we don’t have the cash to backup the purchase, we don’t buy it. You should follow a similar plan.

So we had some ups and some downs which resulted in an overall decrease of $958 from the previous month. Our net worth now stands at $110,599. We moved up over $10,000 last update, so I’ll just pretend this small loss didn’t happen and keep positive. You can’t win em all… But I sure would like too

Were you up or down last month?

you can see all of my net worth updates here.

It was a very Happy Halloween in the Ninja household last night. We had a youth group meetup with about 150 high school kids and it was off the chain. Girl Ninja dressed up as Cruella Deville and had about five other kids dress up as her dalmatians. I, however, was a ceiling fan. Probably my most favorite costume to date.

Anywhoozle, aside from the Halloween festivities, I was able to spend a few moments updating our net worth. I’m liking the way things turned out this month, you’ll see why below…

A$$ets:

Checking Account: $2,141; (change not shown since money is constantly in and out of this account). Finally able to keep this balance under a few thousand dollars. I haven’t been the best at moving money around and often let this creep up to $5,000 plus. Stupid when you consider I am giving up free money by not putting it in my interest earning savings account.

Savings Accounts: $56,981; +$4.929. Finally was able to make some serious progress in our savings category. We haven’t made much of a dent in it since early summer so it feels nice to get back on track. With Girl Ninja working again we should be able to continue this trend for the next seven months. Oh, I also had a pretty good blog month bringing in an extra $2,500 in October. Thanks for letting me make money off you

Roth IRA: $25,672; +$4,199. Added $2,000 in to my Roth IRA last month to max the sucker out for 2011. It’s nice to see a pretty significant gain last month. Who knows how long it will last, but I wont be mad if things keep deciding to improve during November. Keeping my fingers crossed.

TSP (401K): $25,877; +$2,662. Just the standard $350 contribution, plus another $350 employer match. This is probably the easiest money I’ve ever made. Gotta love matching.

Liabilities

Student Loan: $0. Knock Knock. Who’s there? Olive. Olive who? Olive not owing Sallie Mae a freakin’ penny. 

Credit Card: $984 (change not reflected since balance gets paid off). This is the smallest our credit card balance has been in recent years. As much as I wish I could pretend it is because we were super thrifty, it’s actually the result of a reimbursement we got for a purchase we made the previous month. Brought our balance way down, which is a nice change of pace. 

Being invested in the stock market last month was a beautiful thing. It helped push our net worth up another $10,685 from the previous month. This brings our total NW to $111,557. I like the sound of that! It feels AWESOME to make some solid progress and know we are one step closer to securing financial freedom. It’s just what the doctor Ninja ordered.

Anyone else have a great month? What were you for Halloween (or what is your favorite thing you’ve been in the past)?

you can see all of my net worth updates here.