I wish the first quarter had ended on January 26 when the S&P500 peak reached the all-time high of 2,872! But in the end, the first quarter of 2018 was really nothing to write home about. And the second quarter is off to a volatile start as well! But I started with this series exactly a year ago and I might as well keep going! Besides, looking at the visitor stats, these posts are some of the most popular! I don’t blame you for being nosy because net worth updates are some of my favorites to read on other blogs, too! 🙂 Soooo, where do we stand as of 3/31/2018? Let’s take a look at the cold hard numbers…
Tag: net worth
Our Net Worth as of 12/31/2017
Happy New Year! Another quarter-end, I can’t believe how fast time flies! And we all know what that means, right? Net Worth updates across the Financial Independence blogosphere! For us, this is a special NW update because it’s the last one before we both give notice at work in two months! And the last NW update before our apartment goes on the market! In other words, this better looks good, otherwise, we might get cold feet, also known as One More Year Syndrome. Soooo, where do we stand financially? Here are the numbers…
Our Net Worth as of 9/30/2017
Time flies! It’s been six months already since our inaugural Net Worth report. For some reason, we never did a Q2 update! Actually, there is a reason. Watching the ERN family portfolio progress is a little bit like watching paint dry. It’s slooowwww, at least in percentage terms! Every year in the first quarter, we get a nice noticeable bump when the annual bonus rolls in, but outside of bonus season, we feel a bit like living paycheck to paycheck! OK, that’s an exaggeration because we still max out our 401k contributions and pay down the mortgage principal (which we consider savings). But about half of our savings come from one single paycheck and the other half is spread over the remaining 23 paychecks. That’s the privilege of working in the finance industry! So in Q2 and Q3, we might have added a little bit of savings, but the growth in our net worth came mostly from the pretty solid returns in our different investments.
Let’s look at the numbers in detail… Continue reading “Our Net Worth as of 9/30/2017”
Our Net Worth (as of 3/31/2017)
We were surprised by how many personal finance bloggers publish their net worth numbers. J. Money over at RockstarFinance maintains the world’s first and only (to our knowledge) blogger directory and out of almost 1,000 bloggers, over 250 publish their net worth. So, should we publish ours? What good is all that stealth wealth business (see the excellent posts from Physician on FIRE and The Retirement Manifesto) if I post our net worth on the blog? Well, if someone were to find out who we actually are then with or without the precise number it would be pretty obvious that we’re well off. Whether our net worth is $500,000 or $5 million, what’s the difference, then? People get mugged on the street every day for much less. So we might as well show our numbers, right?
This place has extreme wealth inequality, yet everybody is happy!
We are taking a short break from our Safe Withdrawal Rate Series (see the latest post here) to look into some pretty fascinating data we came across the other day. There’s a small place on earth with rampant wealth inequality. If you had just one single dollar in your name you’d be worth more than the entire bottom 27% of the wealth distribution combined. The bottom half of the population owns only about 8.6% of all wealth, while the richest 10% own 40% of all wealth, and the richest 20% own about 62% of all wealth.
Despite the wealth inequality, there is surprising harmony. There’s no call for building walls. And no call for redistributing the “ill-gotten” profits of “evil capitalists” either. There is no envy! Folks in the lowest wealth bracket would regularly compliment their richer counterparts and say “Geez, you are rich. Good for you!”
Where on earth is this place? Continue reading “This place has extreme wealth inequality, yet everybody is happy!”