Welcome to the FindependenceCanada September 2019 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!
When it comes to our net worth we try not to make any goals that are too concrete as we are aware that there are so many variables that may work for, and against you, especially in short time periods, so flexibility is key! Instead, we focus on our savings rate (currently at approx. 50% take home pay) and investing in companies we believe to be stable and truly blue chip in their respective industries. We feel as long as we take care of what’s in our control: earning, saving and investing diligently, the rest will take care of itself and the results will come over the long haul.
Funny what a difference a month can make isn’t it? During our August update we commented on how the stock market decided to pull back in the days leading up to our update and how that can be a little deflating, if you let it be. We’re all at least a little susceptible to stock market fluctuations but the key is to not let it affect your actions – which is exactly what we did this month.
The stock market was pulling back, there were even more news headlines of recessions and trade wars but we stuck with our plan and kept investing as though we had our blinders on and at least for the short term we were rewarded for our endurance.
On the flip side of the coin, this month our savings habits weren’t up to the standard we’d previously set as we ended up dropping about $4,000 on our upcoming trip to Europe and didn’t really spare much expense when looking for things like accommodations. We never went high end or anything but we did trade a little frugality for some comforts as we really want to be able to do and see everything and really enjoy our stay overseas.
Let’s take a look at our assets as of September 15th, 2019:
As you can see the total assets are $769,812 this month! That’s pretty amazing to us as that’s an increase of around $19,000 over last month.
If you compare the two months you’ll see that nearly all of those gains are purely stock market related, some of which is our monthly contributions but a huge chunk was stock market growth.
If only every month could be so kind.
Now on to the liabilities:
Pretty well same old story here, for any new readers the reason that we keep Mrs. FIC’s student loan around is because it’s from the UK and the interest rate on it is right around 1% which at the moment doesn’t seem like a good use of our funds when you consider we’ll get a much greater return from our tax returns alone should we pile money into our RRSP accounts instead.
The mortgage is still on the back of our minds, we’re really thinking of making more double up payments soon but again have not been able to pull that trigger just yet, we’ll likely end up waiting until both RRSP accounts are 100% filled and then start shovelling our income onto the mortgage.
Now on to the reason why we’re all here, the overall net worth:
Our net worth as of September 15, 2019 is $252,760! That’s an increase of $21,151 since last month and we’ve officially crossed the line into becoming quarter-millionaires at 30 years of age. If you read last months update we had said we’d love to hit this milestone by years end and pretty surprised to see it reached this early.
This is obviously a huge milestone for us and we’re very excited about it. We tried to have a talk about what’s next as far as targets and goals are concerned but honestly we don’t really have any idea how long it should take us to reach the next major milestones.
We would love to keep this snowball rolling and and hit at least $275k by years end but the stock market will have a lot to say about whether or not that’s possible.
That’s about all we have to recap for the month, we hope you’ve all been sharing in the generous month of market returns and have been making your own headway towards reaching your financial goals.
We’re great believers in tracking net worth and believe that the act of tracking net worth in and of itself will help you progress much further and much faster than you otherwise might, so that leads us to the question of how many of you out there are tracking your net worth? If you are leave us a comment either here or on Instagram @FindependenceCanada and let us know how you’re doing!
As always, thanks for stopping by!
FIC.