At the beginning of the year I committed to several money-related resolutions and promised to track my progress on Free Money Finance. So far, I've posted updates at the end of the following months:
This is my update for the month ending May 2006.
Since I have several resolutions, not every one will need action every month. However, I plan to mention each one every month just to remind myself and all of you what I'm planning to accomplish this year.
Let's get started. Here's my May update:
- Net Worth -- The stock market giveth, and the stock market taketh away. ;-)
The S&P 500 was up 1.6% five days into May, and I thought I was going to have a banner month. Then the bottom fell out. From its high on May 5, the index lost 5.2% before rebounding to "only" being down 2.7% for the month. Since the majority of my net worth is in the stock market, I went along for the ride. My net worth was down 1.93% for the month. I'm now up only 3.69% for the year and on track to be up 8.8% this year. That's not terrible, but it's a far cry from the 17.3% increase for the year I was looking at on May 1.
- Giving -- We continued our giving to several projects this month per our budget.
- Fully Fund 401k -- It happens automatically every month!
- Investment Review -- I set up all of my accounts to automatically invest at certain times during the month. I had a couple accounts doing this, but decided to make them all automatic. I also doubled the amount that automatically goes from my checking account to my investment account each month.
- Earn Extra Income -- I've made my goal as I surpassed $10,000 for the year this past month! Maybe I should have shot higher. Who knew I'd do so well so soon?
- Retirement Number -- I've run a couple different formulas and am very close at getting my number. And man o' man is it BIG!
- Complete Taxes -- Taxes are completed and put to bed. It's just record keeping for the next several months.
- Get Spouse Up-to-Date on Finances -- I had a reader write and said he wanted to share the family's finances with his spouse, but she didn't seem interested. So, he developed a PowerPoint presentation to summarize the data and showed it to her -- she loved it! I thought this was a great idea and I started my own presentation in May.
- Sort Out College Savings -- No progress made in this area this month.
- Update Will -- No progress made in this area this month.
- Credit Check-ups -- No progress made in this area this month.
- Budgeting -- Nothing required until July.
- Insurance Inventory -- Planning on doing this in the summer.
- Blog Goals -- May was the best month I've had to date, so I I'm doing well. I think I'll be in the mid- to high- forecast range for traffic and pageviews, in the low range for trackbacks, and past the high range (I'm already past them) for revenue and comments.
I'll be reporting on my status with these at the end of every month, so stay tuned to see how I do.
Wow! You did a great job on the extra income, were there other streams of income other than the ones you mentioned in the beginning of the year?
Or did your intended streams produce more than expected?
Posted by: JR | June 09, 2006 at 10:22 AM
My intended streams did better than expected.
Posted by: FMF | June 09, 2006 at 11:30 AM