If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know that my husband and I have a big financial goal. And one way to motivate yourself towards a goal is to track your progress. So every few months, we check how we’re doing on the savings front, and determine whether we’re on track, a little behind, or past the mark (which would be awesome).
Back in an earlier post, I showed you our annual benchmarks in order to meet our million-dollar target. I posted it again below. Last year, we passed our benchmark and landed at $90,897. From a combination of hard-core saving (frugal living rocks!), average-or-better stock market returns, and the magic of compound interest, my savings forecaster (is that a word?) says we could reach our end goal in the Year 2021.
So when we checked our progress back in June, we were excited to find we had met our mid-year benchmark with $125,070.77 in our investment accounts. Now that September has come to a close, it’s time to see if we met our 3rd Quarter benchmark of reaching $151,919.
Did we reach it? Let’s find out.
The Answer Is…
No. (Imagine a sad-sounding tuba…wah-wah…)
We missed it by almost $4,000. But that’s okay! We squirreled away over $20,000 in just under 4 months, so we met our personal savings goal. But, the stock market didn’t cooperate as much this round, so we only saw a hair over $2,000 in returns. But that’s fine. With the stock market down, that’s really the time to BUY! Then we’ll get to ride that amazing upward wave when things turn around (and they always do).
And, we can celebrate that our Net Worth increased from $220,827 to $269,888!
If you’re wondering what all this Net Worth business is about, it’s just one way to get an overall picture of your finances. You sum up the value of all of your assets (house, cash, cars) minus your liabilities (loans, debts, etc), and the result is your Net Worth. (We’ve been debt-free since April 2013, which helps, and it feels fantastic.)
How Do You Save That Much?!?
I still get a lot of questions from readers asking about our ability to save so much each month, and I always say the same thing. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll stay where you’ve always been. We made major lifestyle changes, and you know what happened? We suddenly had money. So we started saving it.
There are many posts here on this blog that go into what we did and how we did it. Just look under my Personal Finance category above. But if you want the full story, and everything we did in one easy-to-read place, I wrote an e-book titled LIVE SMART. ELIMINATE DEBT. BUILD WEALTH., available on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. It covers our entire financial journey, as well as a detailed, step-by-step manual on how to move from debtor to wealth-builder, in just 90 pages.
Now that I’ve shamelessly plugged my book, I’ll wrap up this latest savings update, and here’s to hoping for better results come December!
Rob says
So Laura, your family’s savings pace did well but not your anticipated investment returns, eh? Well, welcome to the club, but not to worry as (as I have often read) September often is a month noted for market correction. Also, given that the market has been on a rather long bull cycle, I figure that it was just a matter of time for profit taking to take place along with the bears coming out to play. As you point out, when stocks go down in price is often a good time to buy more – just make sure that you choose quality investments. Over the years we’ve tended to purchase dividend producing investments and automatically re-invest the monthly dividends. So when these types of stocks decline in price it just means that we are purchasing more stock at cheaper prices – and it’s all set up to happen automatically, without us needing to take any direct action. So my congratulations to you guys on your steady financial journey towards targets. Progress can’t always be measured in a steady upward curve. There will always be peaks and valleys along the way but tracking the path and staying the course is the way to go.
Laura aka Mrs. Nickels says
Well said, Rob. Our dividends automatically reinvest as well, and the vast majority of our investing in general is automatic. We have a small chunk set aside each month to invest in “for fun”, to keep it interesting. But when prices drop, I’ll usually invest that “fun money” into our standard index funds while they’re down.
Keeping our eyes on the prize… 🙂