Our August Net Worth: $352,000

We knew it would be ugly, but yesterday we sat down and tallied up our net worth for July and August. The grand total was $352,000, a decline of nearly 55k since we last measured it in June. This is a drop of nearly 13% in the space of two months.

So, what happened?

Well, there were a number of things. First, the real estate market in DC has been softening, so we adjusted the value of our places accordingly. For our personal residence we adjusted it downwards by 25k, and for the investment property by 10k. We did this based on a review of the real estate listings locally and considered some statistics about state of the market in DC. Its a total downward adjustment of 35k.

Second, our stock portfolio has been beaten down over the past two months. In particular, we've been heavily invested in stocks that rely on commodity prices, especially the price of gasoline and natural gas. Since gasoline prices are declining, many of the stocks in Canadian energy companies we own are out of favor.

However the good news is our cash situation remains strong. So, we should be able to take advantage of today's lower asset prices. We're still following up on our plans to purchase a place in Portland, Oregon and are considering shares in Umpqua Bank (UMPQ). Also, the declines in our networth are largely due to macro-economic factors. e.g asset prices. We can't control real estate or oil prices, so it makes sense to stay focused on things we can control - like saving or buying high quality stocks, rather than stressing about month to month declines our net worth.

Here are the gritty details: