Net Worth Update – February 2021 (Our worst month ever!)

Welcome to the FindependenceCanada February 2021 Net Worth Update. This is where we track our monthly updates on our quest to a One Million dollar net worth and beyond. We have worked diligently over the last few years to go from having a negative net worth to the position we are in here today, and we hope that we are able to motivate others to join us on our quest to financial independence!

To view last months update click here.

As you could likely guess from the title, this month didn’t go well for the FIC household – at least in terms of net worth and accumulation of assets.

This month was so bad in fact, that it’s likely thrown off our years goal before the year has hardly begun!

What was the main reason for this? Well you’ll see down below…

As always we’ll get started with the assets:

Now assuming you don’t pay THAT close of attention to our detailed numbers I’ll help you out with where our assets took a massive dive this month – our HOUSE.

That’s right, our home assessment from the city went from over $508,000 all the way down to $467,810 in one year. Now, I don’t know how fully I believe this number, it’s still likely close enough to the real one that there’s no sense arguing it. Since this assessment from the city is the number we go by this is the number for the rest of 2021.

Let’s hope for a housing recovery in Alberta this year.

Outside of that massive hit we took the rest of our accounts actually performed really quite well this past month as the market has been in a steady but upward trend for us and we’ve managed to keep throwing cash in as we go.

If you checked out our latest post updating our dividend portfolio you will see that we’ve also taken a little bit of risk off the table, or so we think anyways and in doing so lost a tiny bit of dividend income moving forward but the capital appreciation and security of these payouts should be at an all time high in our portfolios.

Now onto the liabilities:

As usual our liabilities are boring and we like it that way, the only thing we have to talk about here is the fact that you’ll notice our outstanding mortgage owing is now higher than the asset itself, meaning we’ve just crossed into having negative equity in our home for the time being.

Aside from that these liabilities will remain the same, we have no intentions of paying off our home early at this point and once our student loan payments resume later this year we will only be doing minimal monthly payments as this is a 1% student loan from the UK.

And here’s the main number!

We’re down $30,000 from last months update of $413,000 but that’s okay.

Watching this number go down this way gave me an interesting feeling, I’ve always been a little bit conflicted about how important of a number net worth actually is as it doesn’t really accomplish anything the way our household cashflow does – or our passive income will do in the future but it is a good tool of marking overall progress I guess?

While it would be nice to have more equity when we sell off whenever it is we decide to leave our current city we don’t actually factor in the sale of our house, cars, furniture etc. into any of our plans we just assume we’ll break even and plan entirely off our cash on hand and investment accounts.

As mentioned earlier in this post taking a $40,000 hit to our house and $30,000 hit to our net worth this early on in the year likely means that we’ll be hard pressed to reach our goal of $500,000 this year but that’s okay we’ll get as close as we can anyways.

That is where we will leave off for today, we hope you enjoyed the update.

As always if you’ve got any questions or comments feel free to leave them below or over on our social medias:
Instagram @FindependenceCanada 
Twitter @FindependenceC1

and we’ll be sure to get back to you.

Thanks for stopping by,

FIC.