Hello May! Happy to see you. Spring has FINALLY Sprung! With the beginning of the growing season upon us has our net worth began to grow again? After a couple down months let’s take a look:
As always, you can check the latest and greatest info on the Track Our Progress page.
First, the numbers:
Net Worth: $339,494 Up $6,659 (2.00%)
Portfolio Balance: $254,143 Up $7,049 (2.85%)
(New) Monthly Contributions: $1,700 Up $383
At last, the green is showing up on the spreadsheets and not just my lawn and (most of) my trees. Also, if you read last month’s update I was forecasting another month of declines. So all in all:
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Recap
While not as crazy as March (new car, broke up with our Financial Advisor), April was still a bit wild financially.
We’ve been transferring our investments from Edward Jones to Vanguard as you can read in our Great Financial Migration Posts (Part I & Part II). The majority of our funds are now in their forever home. The portfolio performance is somewhat surprising seeing that the switch incurred a number of transaction fees.
April also marked the first month I’ve been able to invest a portion of my Health Spending Account (HSA). If you are looking for a great primer on the benefits of investing in a HSA, then check out THIS POST from the Mad Fientist. There is a minimum account balance that is required to “unlock” the investment options. For this particular account it was $2,000.00. Thankfully, my employer automatically contributes $1,000.00 a year to this account as an incentive for choosing the high-deductible health plan. Now that I’ve reached the minimum balance I can transfer the future paycheck contributions to the investment account. As luck would have it, Vanguard’s Total Stock Market Index Fund is one of the many options available. Easy peasy.
How Did the Funds Perform in April
To be honest… I truly don’t know. So much money was moving around during the month that all the performance metrics are skewed. After the transfer of funds, we now predominantly hold two funds: Vanguard’s Total Stock Market and Total Bond Market funds so comparing one fund against the others really is like staring into a mirror.
Coming up in May
Our oldest kiddo is graduating from daycare and heading off to a summer program at the end of the month. This is a big step for her and a few bucks less every week that will start going to things other than daycare.
We are still focused on paying off that new car loan. This will hold down our monthly investment contributions until the car loan is gone.
I mentioned that with spring here, most of our trees are greening up. Not included in that category is a massive pin oak in our backyard which appears to have succumbed to a particularly bad infestation of horned oak galls (nasty tumor-like growths resulting from small wasps… seriously do a google image search, these things are nightmarish looking).
We are going to give this beast a few more weeks, and if it doesn’t start blooming then the axe (or chainsaws) will swing. It will like a fat stack of Benjamins to safely dispose of this tree. Here’s hoping she pulls through it.
I hope your investments are greening up as well. Thanks for reading and check back in next week!