December 29, 2007

A Day of Reckoning (2007)

Egads, but this year flew by! This Ducky’s fiscal travels were all over the map this year. I covered the balance tranfer/App-o-Rama adventure, the lending money debacle, the frantic savings race, and the monthly bills marathon. So let’s take a look and see what kind of shape 2007 turned out to be.

Originally, I decided these were my goals:

At the time of last year’s goal-making, I didn’t make any special note of the regular emergency fund, because it was full. These are the major highlights:

• February: I had the emergency trip to Vietnam. Cost: ~ $4200
  
• (Feb) Made the biggest financial mistake I’ve made to date, and lent BroDucky $20k. I received $4k back midyear, and haven’t seen a dime more since then. He also stopped his car and insurance payments which were $700/mo. Total Cost: $16,000 + $4200 = $20,200. I had to foot the rest of the auto-related bills and the $16k. [*ow*]
  
• In July, I got the word that a major raise was coming my way. Only the first 5% kicked in at that time, as well as a small quarterly bonus and cell phone stipend, the rest of it came in a lump sum later on.
  
• October: all OT ceased and my income went down to an absolute base amount. Again, ow. That costs, on average, $600/month. Cost: ~$1800
  
• Received the fat supplementary-income bonus check, split it up into taxes/savings/spending deposits. Did the same with my Christmas bonus. Plus: $16,500; setting aside $4465 for taxes.
  

I sure wish that I had a Day of Reckoning for 2006 for comparison’s sake. There was so much upheaval, though, that it’s going to take way too much time to figure it all out manually. Instead, I will create the starting point for whatever information I can access now, similar to the monthly snapshots, and that’ll be my baseline for next year.

Cash Savings (not income meant for bills): Unexpected Expenses – $28,600

I saved enough to nearly refill the emergency fund and to cover the lost $16,000. Originally I was going to use the rest of the e-fund, but saved really diligently to try and cover as much as possible out of this year’s income instead. I’ll be paying the saved $16k back out in a month, so the year-end cash total I’ll be keeping is a shade less than I started out with this year. *one last sigh for lost savings*

Retirement Investments:
Vanguard rescued this disorganized PF idiot by providing year-end balance comparisons. They don’t break out the contributions versus earnings, but I guess that doesn’t matter.
A huge driver for the increase in retirement savings is the fact that I received a great deal of untaxed bonus money to supplement the shortfall of income. Saving that much pretax money also saved me approximately $2000 worth of owed taxes.

December 4, 2007

December Snapshot

I’ve some small gains in my retirement accounts, but that’s because the market ticked up just in time for my monthly round-up. It’s been up and down all month, and mostly down for three of the past four. It would be tough on more than just morale if I depended on it for income in the short-term.

The liquid savings was knocked back a little because the truck payment is draining my expense account every month. So far I haven’t been forced to pull money from savings to pay it yet, but I am taking savings out to pay for the costs of the NY trip as I mentioned before. I’d really like to sell it soon, but it turns out I still need the convenience of a third car at home during this difficult time.

Pa was recently downsized so if he doesn’t get a new one soon, we won’t need three cards for three people and I’ll sell the truck in January.

Overall, the assets increased by 1.5%.

Debts are decreasing steadily as well, and by equally small amounts. Due to the recent events, and all the nights I’ve spent with BoyDucky at the hospital, I haven’t killed off the BT debt to start a new one yet. I have, however, taken credit limit increases across the board for all my Citi cards in anticipation of the new BT. That increased my total credit line available for a future BT from 18k to 24k. I took advantage of Citi’s credit limit increase feature on the website to avoid any hard pulls on my credit.