Net Worth: Dec. ’09

November is in the books, and daddy likes what he sees. How’s that one song go? Oh, that’s right…”Moving on up.” I use to despise tracking my NW because being in the red depressed me, but I’ve totally become obsessed with it. Watching that red dot move up each month totally turns me on. Let’s see how I did, shall we?

Checking Account: $3,060, -$2,122. Don’t worry little children. It’s okay that my account dropped a couple G’s. I had over $5,000 in my checking last month so I just moved that money around. I generally try to keep $1,000 to $2,000 here. Looks like I need to move around a bit more money.

Savings Account: $19,525, +$4,790. I made the switch to INGdirect last month and am totally happy with that decision. I worked a bunch the last couple weeks so I had some generous overtime and travel reimbursements to include in here. For those of you that are wondering why I have more in savings than I have debt, read this article.

Roth IRA: $11,887, +$695. Booya for some growth in the stock market last month. My total contributions almost match my account balance. I invest in three different vanguard mutual funds and they have been doing alright this year.

401K: $10,772, +$923. Eight percent of each paycheck makes its way in to this account. I invest in very similar funds in both my Roth IRA and 401K. I get 5% of my paycheck fully matched, so you know I’m not about to pass up free money.

Student Loan: -$16,301, +$1,566. Dropped that sucker another $1.5K and I am oh so happy. I love knowing I could pay this sucker off today if I really wanted to. I think I’ll keep Sallie Mae around for a bit longer, but her days are numbered.

I’m rocking a solid  $27,389 net worth. I’m up $4,969 from last month. I’m in absolute love with the $5K swing. I don’t anticipate getting to have such drastic improvements over the coming months with holiday expenses and travels, but any movement in the upwards direction is fine by me. I’m totally stoked to cruise around the PF blogosphere this week and see how others are doing as well.

If you have wondered why the blue bar (debt) in the graph sometimes increases, it’s because my credit card balance gets taken in to account each month. Even though I pay the balance in full it still appears as a “liability” in Quicken. I just deduct this from my checking account balance to give myself an accurate net worth reading. I choose not to include my car in my NW calculations, which would probably increase my worth by about $8K.