This year is off to a decent start. My net worth increased by a little over 10% in January.  It helped that the stock market performed well and that I received three paychecks. However, as mentioned in the previous post, January was a bit atypical. I took a two week vacation and I’m settling in to my new condo.

I’m still experimenting with how I want to post my current holdings and net worth.  In December I was less detailed than usual. For January, I’ve decided to go back to being more detailed in hopes of controlling my online spending.  Typically the reason why I go over budget during any given month is because of a website called Amazon.com.

Without further adieu, my  net worth at the end of January can be summarized below:

Liquid Assets	Start	End	$ Change
Cash & Checking	$450	$700	+$250
Amazon Balance	$0	$0	+$0
Emergency Fund	$3,405	$4,100	+$695
Irregular Bills	$0	$1,185	+$1,185
Short-Term Savings	$525	$95	($430)
Long-Term Savings	$0	$150	+$150
Brokerage #1	$502	$530	+$30
Brokerage #2	$195	$380	+$185
Illiquid Assets	Start	End	$ Change
Savings Bonds	$2,135	$1,650	($485)
Home Equity	$11,850	$13,225	+$1,375
401K	$26,235	$28,517	+$2,282
Roth IRA	$20,224	$21,548	+$1,324
Liabilities	Start	End	$ Change
Credit Cards	($0)	($636)	($636)
Medical	($0)	($735)	($735)
Furniture Loan	($1,792)	($1,687)	+$105
401K Loan	($10,748)	($10,432)	+$316
Net Worth	$52,981	$58,592	+$5,611
% Change			+10.6%

Liquid Assets

• Cash & Checking – I try to maintain a $500 cash cushion in my checking account.
• Amazon Balance – This is a new account I’ll be tracking in hopes of curbing my impulsive Amazon spending.
• Emergency Fund – I contributed a bit and had some illiquid savings bonds (ibonds) obtain liquidity.
• Irregular Bills –  I hold cash for less-than-monthly bills in this account. I included this account in my “Cash & Checking” category.
• Short-Term Savings, Long Term Savings, Brokerage #1 & 2 – I saved & invested a little.

Illiquid Assets

• Savings Bonds – This decreased due to savings bonds (ibonds) becoming liquid assets.
• Home Equity – I made my first mortgage payment this month, and I’m finally gaining equity.
• 401K & Roth IRA – the market performed well and these accounts saw a nice increase.

Liabilities

• Credit Cards – for the first time in a while I’m carrying over a credit card balance. It’s not much and it’s on a card with 0% APR. I’m not thrilled about it at all.
• Medical – sigh, medical bills…
• Furniture Loan  – I’m paying this off over the course of 18 months. It is a 0% APR loan.
• 401K Loan – I borrowed money from my 401K to finance my house.

Budget & Spending

One thing I have yet to officially post is a budget for 2018. The biggest change from last year, of course, will be considerably higher housing expenses. I will not be disclosing my housing expenditures. I’ll have to figure out a way to incorporate increases in my HOA fees on this blog. The budget/savings plan I’d like to follow for the remainder of the year is as follows:

Category	Budget
Mortgage	$-
Bills & Utilities	$250
Food	$200
Everything Else	$200
Total	$650

Since January was a weird month, I didn’t intend to follow a budget, but I did want to keep my spending comparable to that of a typical month ($650). Unfortunately I went quite a bit over. Below is my spending:

Category	Budget	Actual
Mortgage & HOA	$-	$-
Vacation	$-	$410
Bills & Utilities	$-	$200
Food	$-	$215
Transportation	$-	$25
Medical	$-	$110
Everything Else	$-	$220
Total	$650	$1,180

• Vacation – this includes everything spent while on vacation including food, taxis, souvenirs, etc.
• Bills – I had an annual bill I paid this month ($50 towards this blog) , I am still waiting on my first electric bill so I expect that to be considerably high.
• Food – I didn’t expect to eat out much after my vacation, but it was Restaurant Week ($85) and I also went out to a going away lunch ($15) for a colleague. I subscribed for grocery deliveries as well ($15) due to being sick.
• Transportation – ubers and lyfts
• Medical – this includes both direct and indirect healthcare expenses. These are reimbursable.
• Everything Else – I did a bit more shopping than planned, mostly on Amazon. Hopefully I do better in February.  Moving in to a new place is expensive.

I was about $530 over budget. Thankfully my extra paycheck and pay raise helped offset the over spending.

Goals

My 2018 Goal Progression is below:

Fund/Goal	Budgeted	Actual	Value
Emergency Fund	$50	$185	$5,750
Roth IRA	$460	$460	$460*
Short-Term Savings	$50	$95	$95
Long-Term Savings	$50	$150	$150
Irregular Bills Acct	$50	$50	$1,180

* – the value for my Roth IRA is my YTD contributions

In February I would like to limit the number of financial spending transactions to the number of days in the month. I’m actually not sure how many transactions I usually make, but I think 28 is a good number to start off with. Last month there were 72 such transactions, but  a lot of that was because of my vacation. I also would like to limit my online shopping to Mondays and Thursdays.

That’s all I have for January folks!