October Review: Not Too Bad!

This turned into a good month for my retirement accounts; after sliiiiiiiiiiding to the point where I lost all my gains for the year and then some, they rebounded pretty nicely.

As a result of both that, and it being a reasonable month for expenditures in other areas, I did in fact break the $10,000 mark in net worth! I knew this was a possibility, but everything was going to have to break exactly right: no major unexpected expenses, and the markets were gonna have to do the right thing. So I was trying not to get too excited, and conservatively estimating that I'd do it with my mid-November paycheck instead.

But here we are! Cool. It feels good. Next goal: $20,000! Again, if everything breaks exactly right, I could do that in time for my 1-year blogging anniversary at the end of March. It might not happen, but it could! Let's call it my stretch goal.

The numbers, and then some commentary:

-- I went a bit over in the food category, using all the cash for the month that I took out, but also paying for a few quick meals (sandwiches, that kind of thing) on the credit card. 

--"Repairs & Maintenance" is a new category in my budget. I'm going to try to sock away a little money there every month; this month, I needed to buy and install a new car battery, and get a new touchscreen for my ipad after I dropped it and the glass shattered. I thought I'd budgeted for both things, out of "slush" and from a freelance check I had coming in, but the battery ended up being a little more expensive than I thought, so I went over by $16 there.

--I was able to reassign money from "slush" to cover those expenses and most of the two trips I took, one to Chicago and one to visit a friend about a six-hour drive away. But I couldn't quite cash-flow both of them, so I ended up moving money out of my travel savings. I got a little confused about what exactly the numbers were on that travel savings account since I moved money in and out of it multiple times for multiple reasons, so I decided not to bother trying to figure out what exact final deal was -- hence the two places where I have question marks.

--Also notable, I got a reimbursement check for $155; since what I was being reimbursed for was an expense I'd put on my credit card back in January (long story why it took so long) and had been counting as part of my debt, I therefore made a higher than planned debt payment; instead of just the $450 from my paycheck, I paid down $605 of credit card debt.

Which leads me to the stirring conclusion: as of midnight on October 31, I have $737-ish of credit card debt, sizable increases in both my IRA and 403(b) accounts, and the drop I noted yesterday in my emergency and travel funds because I raided them to buy more IRA shares. The end result:

Net worth of $10,352, which is up $2840.00 from last month! 

This is a really, really big net worth increase, much better than I would normally expect to do. The combination of receving the freelance and reimbursement checks, the markets doing bad things at the end of last month and good things this month, and overall mostly sticking to the budget in other areas, all pushed me this far. Cool.