Each month, I share a net worth update for the Brewing FIRE household. This brief summary of our financial standing serves as a progress report on our journey to financial independence.
In addition to giving a snapshot of our net worth, I will take a brief look at our spending, saving, and investing activity for the month.
October 2020 Net Worth
We use Personal Capital to track our net worth. Personal Capital makes it easy to track all of our banking accounts, investing accounts, credit cards and loans all in one place. Personal Capital also has numerous other functions for analyzing your investment holdings, asset allocation and performance, as well as some great retirement planning tools.
October – Making Moves
October may have been the longest month of my life. It certainly felt that way.
Here’s my post from last week, which summarizes the big changes in our world.
After a few months of unsuccessful remote job hunting, Mrs. BF got an interview request. And then a second interview. And then a (really good) offer, which she accepted. We’re officially moving to Virginia.
We sold our house in 48 hours, after a flurry of showings and 7 bids in excess of asking price. We made out pretty well on this house, certainly better than last time, and we’re on track to close in early December.
I quit my job. Or, at least, I attempted to quit. I’m not exactly sure what the future holds, but I’ll be working remotely for the next couple months, at least. After that, we’ll re-evaluate.
Our daughter celebrated her 3rd birthday. Holy crap, we have a 3-year-old! What a blast it’s been. Parenting is really challenging, and equally rewarding, but I absolutely love it. I’m looking forward to more quality time with the kids after we relocate.
Month-Over-Month Comparison
Talk about a shit-show of a month. This is an ugly breakdown, but I’ll try to explain it a bit.
First off, I front-loaded some investments with the knowledge that we’ll be adding a huge chunk to our cash reserves with the sale of the house. We’ll be renters in Richmond for at least 6 months, so we’re going to be sitting on a bunch of money pretty soon.
Also, we had to make a number of large deposits in VA (rental, daycare, etc…) which totaled more than $5,000. We’ll get this back eventually.
On top of this, the markets dropped a bit in September, which was at least partially offset by our large investment contributions.
Finally, the estimate on our home cratered again this month, which doesn’t matter, but it caused a further swing in our theoretical net worth. Overall, I don’t think our numbers will settle much until end of the year, but that’s fine.
Spending and Not Spending
| Category | Spending | Comment |
| Mortgage | $1,221 | |
| Utilities | $130 | |
| Home Maintenance | $0 | |
| Student Loan | $0 | |
| Transportation | $329 | Yearly service, gas |
| Childcare | $1,832 | |
| Medical | $0 | |
| Groceries | $370 | |
| Restaurants | $334 | (take-out) |
| Shopping / Misc. | $251 | |
| Discretionary | $344 | |
| Subscriptions | $72 | |
| Travel | $0 | |
| Other | $242 | Move-related |
| Total | $5,125 |
This was actually a pretty tame month, spending-wise. I didn’t include the various housing and daycare deposits we made, because they’ll show up in our November/December costs.
We spent more on take-out this month, mostly because we were evicted numerous times for showings, inspections, and other house-selling causes.
We’re going to incur some one-off expenses related to the move, but Mrs. BF’s $15,000 relocation / sign-on bonus will more than compensate for the costs.
For example, I had to buy a hard case for my 1935 archtop acoustic guitar that I almost gave away before learning it’s only 1 of 6 in the world. Also, we had to buy Mrs. BF a used iPhone because she’s been using an employer-provided phone the past 5 years. I’m not looking forward to paying my first cell phone bill in 5 years, but it was nice while it lasted.
Income and Investing
In addition to our normal paychecks, we collected the last month of rent on the Basement Bungalow apartment. When we finished our basement in 2017, we intended to rent it out a little bit and eventually use it as another entertainment space or a place for guests to stay with us. But here we are, weeks from selling the house, and we never actually used the space ourselves. It’s fine though: we took in $39,500 in rent over the past 3 years, and the whole project only cost us $15,000. Additionally, I’m sure it boosted the sale value of the home. So overall I’d say it was worth our effort.
We’re still selling as much of our possessions as possible in preparation for the move. The house is half-empty at this point, but we have more to go. Our year-to-date sales figures look like this:
| Month | Sales |
| January | $58 |
| February | $66 |
| March | $36 |
| April | – |
| May | $1,512 |
| June | $585 |
| July | $240 |
| August | $165 |
| September | $285 |
| October | $995 |
| Year-to-Date Total | $3,941 |
We’re planning to use this money to repurchase furniture and other things we may need as we get settled in our new home. It feels really good to purge so much crap, and hopefully we won’t ever own as much stuff in the future.
I think I’ll talk about the new investments we’re making in another post. There’s still a bunch of stuff up in the air, so I’ll wait until the dust settles before outlining our approach. Plus, I have to figure out what we’re going to do with ~$150,000 in cash!
That concludes the October update. How was your month? Did your October seem to last 5 eternities also? Let me know in the comments.
you planning on trying to sell that guitar through an auction house or something? we have a couple of pieces of unknown value we might need appraised but of course you have to pay for that appraisal and we haven’t gotten around to that. 4 grand is really good for selling crap. renting an apartment or small house should keep the level of stuff down for a while but junk tries really hard to enter our lives. i look forward to seeing what you do with that cash pile and how much risk you’re willing to take on with it. those kids are getting big pretty fast.
I’m going to keep the guitar, for now. The only reason I didn’t ditch it years ago was that I really liked the feel and sound of it; I could sense the quality, although I didn’t realize it was so rare. I’ve looked through PF Reddit to see what those clowns recommend to do with a large cash pile, and basically they say to put it in ‘high yield’ savings (0.6% interest) if you need it in the next 5 years. Fuck that, that’s way too boring for me. I will probably invest 50%, put 25% in something more stable, and another 25% in cash. We’ll see.