Net Worth & Life Report: February 2017
March 6, 2017
On Money
Income
Our normal income is two full time day job salaries. We experiment with earning money on the side, including minimal cash flow that we don’t touch from an investment property. The goal is to replace our day job income before my health gives out and prevents me from working.
Achievemint: I signed up on January 18th (sign up here and get a 250 point bonus!) but the app pulled data from Apple Health and retroactively rewarded me for activity done before I signed up for my account. Whee!! So I got credit for part of December and the full month of January. PiC pointed out a weird thing: he earned 7 points for running 6 miles. I earned 6 points for walking 2900 steps.
My guess was the app learns what your norm is and sets that as the baseline so that it’s not giving someone who usually runs 5-10 miles a week a vast number of points while giving people like me a quarter of a point per month. But it turns out these differentials were pulling from different apps so I am totally confused.
December: walked 47362 steps, earned 123 points.
January: walked 98,480 steps, earned 256 points.
February: walked 112,705 steps, earned 293 points.
Swagbucks: I use this daily and used to rack up near 100 points a day but earning has slowed down. My favorite hands-off earning method, NCrave, has turned into a hands-on activity, forcing you to keep your mouse on the page in order for the countdown to continue. Boo! My big earners now are surveys.
Poshmark: Sales remain slow so this stays on the backburner. It’s active, but I don’t spend a ton of time on it. 4 items sold for a total of $22.50.
Dividend income: Our stock portfolio has paid $168 to date. Such baby beans! A disappointing first quarter, I’ll tell you what.
Spending
Our normal spending includes the living expenses for two households so this ignores those ordinary living expenses. When buying anything online, I always check Mr.Rebates and Ebates for cashback.
Personal spending: $106. We FINALLY submitted JuggerBaby’s passport application. We might travel internationally this year, and I hope that that’s all we need it for.
Projected spending: Our loan was pre-approved for the vasty sum of $800k, quadrupling our monthly mortgage commitment. Eeep!!! I have a plan to cut that in half after we sell our primary residence, but it’s still ugly.
Saving and investing
We max out an IRA and 401(k) every year, and save 20% of our net salaries.
We’re going to have to cut waaaayyyy back on our saving rate when the new place comes into play. Do Not Like!
#GivingCards and Charitable Giving
I don’t believe in tooting our horn for every donation we make. The point of giving isn’t to brag, it’s to help someone in need. The exception is when the cause is sound and could use help. I’m delighted to be taking part in the Rockstar Forums’ giving project where they send out a $20 gift card each month to forum participants who sign up.
My January card arrived the day after tornados pummeled New Orleans. The Louisiana area keeps getting pounded with horrible destructive weather, hurting and killing people, destroying homes and generally making a wreck of the place. While I thought I had this earmarked for something else, my heart said that there’s no better way to spend this $20 than to provide 60 hot meals for the people of New Orleans. Better yet, we were able to get a match on the donation so our $20 #GivingCard + $20 #1GoodMoneyThing made a $40 baby, and therefore 120 hot meals!
My February card just arrived so I haven’t decided yet where it should go, but I have a couple thoughts.
Net worth: weird
Our net worth is up 10.1% since last month but this is just a snapshot of the moment.
We’re going to have a lot of ups and downs over the next several months. We’ve got a temporary loan for the down payment which will be repaid when all the dust settles. That has artificially inflated our cash account, and then you’ll see all of that and more disappear when we make an offer that’s accepted. I was going to skip this section entirely but then decided that if I’m going on this roller coaster, you’re coming with me. The more the merrier!
Links from this month
- Figuring out family and asking for support
- Our childcare and costs: Winter 2017 update
- When refrigerators go bad
On Health
Working out: My average activity level was higher this month which was easier to figure out now that I have the Achievemint app pulling data out of the Health app. Yay apps! I wish I could just download directly out of the Health app but this works too. Assuming that 10000 steps is about 4.5 miles, since my stride is at best medium length, I’d say I’m at 2,222 steps per mile.
January (98,480 steps): about 44 miles.
Not only have I been not sick for at least several days consecutively, Seamus and I took advantage of a rare clear bright and sunny day to go for a jog. That was pretty awesome.
February (112,705 steps): about 50.72 miles.
On Life
Date night!: We paid a sitter to watch JuggerBaby for the first time ($75!) because a friend was having a Major Birthday. It was fun to see all the adult friends without kids clamoring for our attention, but I’m not in a hurry to a large gathering like that again for another … oh, a year at least.
I very much preferred what I think of as our actual first date night. After getting a fractious JB settled in bed for the night, we hung out tucked up under a cozy comforter, reading our little social media feeds. Then I found Babe, and nudged PiC into looking at the cute puppies with me. We ended up watching the whole movie together. When’s the last time we saw a whole movie, together? It was a splurge, as far as the time spent late into the night, and getting up the next morning was painful but it was cozy and enjoyable.
On maybe not common sense, and phone maintenance: PiC’s been jogging along with his low key iPhone, getting increasingly frustrated with the loss of functionality as it got harder and harder for his charger to make a connection. He kept jamming it in there and making it work but I suspected we were going to face another phone purchase well before plan.
Usually I’m the family IT and tech troubleshooter but I just had no time to give it more than annoyed thoughts at the end of the day. Then things became dire when the memory filled up but I couldn’t do a massive clear off like usual, my desktop just wouldn’t recognize his phone.
He finally sat down with it, all set to be MacGyver, and felt like a right fool when it turned out the plug couldn’t connect because it was physically blocked by a gob of fluff, dust, and fur!
His phone hacked up a furball and they’ve been getting on swimmingly since. Free and easy – just the way I like all my tech solutions.
:: How was your February?
*Part of Financially Savvy Saturdays on brokeGIRLrich and Super Saving Tips*
LOL on the furball from the phone! So glad it was an easy fix in this case, although I bet PiC felt a little silly for struggling with the functionality for so long.
Seems like a not-bad month for you. So, what do your points on Acheivemint net you? I can sign up just so you get the bonus points and see what it is, just wondering what i should expect out of it.
@SP: I had no hope of it being an easy fix but was THRILLED that it was š
You get $10 per 10,000 points. It takes a long while to earn if you’re as sedentary as I am but if you hook up more than one app, I’m sure you’d make your way there a lot faster!
Great job with your steps! I’m at about half of that. š
Achievemint sounds interesting. I will check that out. Good luck with your house hunting..
Oh, oops. My weekly steps is about half your monthly. I’m ahead after all. š
@Joe: I was going to be shocked that my steps were more than yours – there’s no way! š
I love the idea of Achievement, but I don’t use any apps that connect with it. (I have a Wii Fit Meter for tracking steps – I love it, and it was the most accurate pedometer on the market at one time, but it only syncs with the Wii U and nothing else.) I was doing one of the phone apps that paid gift cards a while back, but it was too much work to enter everything in (and I hardly go to the gym anymore – thanks baby!) But yeah, I definitely love the idea of it pulling straight from the device – just not enough to get one of the devices that would work with it. š
Hahaha that tech support! I’ve had a few things like that, where it seems like something might be permabroken, and then once I get a quiet hot second to sit down with it, there’s a “derp” moment of realization that it’s really just a simple fix. Phew!
I only connect the Apple Health app that’s built in, are you lucky enough not to be on the Apple boat? š
I haven’t been very regular with my exercise lately, but I think I might check out Achievemint. I could always use an added incentive.
Glad you were able to have a night out and a date night…those are important!
I guess it’s easy to laugh now at the low-tech fix for the phone. I wish my laptop were as easily repaired. I tripped over the charging cord and it bent or broke something inside the laptop. Not good, especially the same month as huge dental bills.
I love that the initial incentive is nice but also that they’re likely to build other ways to manage health and build points too.
Oh no, I’ve done exactly the same thing with my laptop charging cord too! It cost me $75 D:
I feel the same way about tooting my own horn with charity, which is why I skipped the Rockstar Finance $20/charity offer. I didn’t feel good about publicizing what I was doing – not that I’m judging anyone who is at all – helping is awesome under any circumstance! And that’s awesome about the match on the donation for the meals!!
In the case of the Rockstar program, I look at my involvement as supporting the growth of the program rather than showing off what we gave which is usually just a drop in the bucket.
Thanks for introducing Achievement! I love getting rewarded for something that I am already doing š
Your Babe date night sounds wonderful. Mr. BL and I got wine and “special foods” (hummus, pita, olives and grapes) for dinner last night and had a date in our living room.
You’re welcome! And yours sounds like just the right key too š
Glad the phone was a simple furball fix! Sounds like you had a good math. Kudos on choosing to give!
Same here!
That’s so good to be able to put 20% of your income into retirement. I wish I had started doing that much earlier in my life.
It’s not easy. I had to fight pretty hard to be in a position to preserve that much income from our required spending, especially as expenses rise, but anything that you can save, whenever you can start, is better than nothing!
10% increase in net worth? That’s fantastic! Looks like you guys are doing well. Maxing out your 401K’s and IRA’s. Do you guys do roth or traditional?
Thanks! We do traditional IRAs.