As I left you last month we were pondering whether our youngest broke her foot while I was typing Update 16. After an urgent care visit, I can thankfully report that she only sprained her foot, and after a few days of hobbling around she’s good as new. Wheew! So besides luckily dodging health issues, were there any financial bumps in the road in April? Keep reading to find out.
As always, you can check the latest and greatest info on the Track Our Progress page.
First, the numbers:
Net Worth:
- End of April Balance: $469,650 Up $7,000 (1.51%)
- Year to Date (YTD): Up $77,812 (19.86%)
- Since January 2018: Up $164,650
Portfolio:
- End of April Balance: $329,863 Up $15,733 (5.01%)
- YTD: Up $66,326 (25.17%)
- Since January 2018: Up $86,963
Monthly Contributions:
- $4,600.97 Up 9.06%
Everything trended upwards for the fourth straight month. But something looks off doesn’t it? Net Worth only went up $7,000 while the Portfolio went up $15,733… how can that be?
Well according to Personal Capital the difference is due to a sharp drop in the value of house and rental property. Both of which dropped significantly on the same day. To add further confusion the “Zestimate” for each house from Zillow that Personal Capital sources actually show increased property values over the same period of time.
Weird. My guess is this is due to a glitch in the Matrix, or more appropriately, the algorithm that Personal Capital and/or Zillow use. Have any of you PC users noticed a similar issue recently?
April Highlights
Take our FI cards because we just bought another car!
Yep. 1 year after buying a new car for myself, we went ahead and bought another new car for my wife. Are we crazy? Possibly. I will delve deeper into our thought process on this in an upcoming post. But before you banish us from the path to Financial Independence, at least let me get in that the vehicle is nearly twice as fuel efficient and much more reliable than the one we traded in. Plus Mrs .Heartland on Fire is a happy camper, which is kinda a big deal!
We went negative on our bank account balance… Again
Imagine waking up and first thing you see is an alert on your phone that your bank account balance has dropped to 0… This happened in March when we accidentally double paid our credit card. That sucked. But get this… we did it again in April!
The culprit this time was yours truly. I transferred money to our online savings account without first transferring money into the account that the online account pulled from. Face palm! #MoneyFail
Coming Up in May
The end of May marks our first vacation of the year. One that is very eagerly awaited. It will be interesting to see how it impacts the finances as we typically don’t watch the dollars too closely during trips. It’s part of how we try to keep a balance between frugality and enjoying the moment.
One thing on our radar for consideration is trying to drop our Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI) on our primary house. We put less than 20% down when we purchased it so we are stuck paying this monthly fee until we reach an 80% loan to value (LTV) ratio. Put another way, PMI goes away when the value of the loan is less than 80% of the appraised value of the property.
Typically, this goes away automatically once you reach the 80% LTV; however, property values have been rising around us and we’ve done a number of renovations which should increase the home’s value. We are considering approaching the mortgage holder to see if the value is such that we can drop this payment. Likely we will have to have an appraisal done to do so.
Thanks for reading and happy May!
Zillow fluctuates pretty regularly. I don’t know if they look at market trends and if sales go down or average sale price goes down, they’ll take down the whole area. That’s the thing about computer algorithms, they are very unpredictable.
I use Zillow only as 1/3 of the estimate I place on our home. One third is what the tax assessment comes in at. The other third is just my estimate based on what I see for selling prices and activity myself. That tends to level it out a bit more than just using one input.
Thanks! That’s a good strategy. The weird thing is the trends in the values on Zillow were up on the day the values plummeted on PC. Totally contradicting each other.