Hello All,
Yesterday afternoon we sat down and calculated our networth. June looks about the same as May. That is to say, last month our wealth was $356,000. Now its $359,000. Its not bad, but its less than 1% growth in the past 30 days.
Three observations.
1) We have a great deal of unallocated cash. My wife Miel received a $5,000 gift from her dad, and she has $3,000 worth of tax returns which haven’t been allocated. Had we invested this 8 thousand, we might have broken the $360,000 mark. We were both hoping this would occur this month, but we may have to wait until July.
2) Stocks accounted for most of our growth. The shares in our TIAA – CREF and Schwab accounts were going like gang busters in May. However this month we’ve seen smaller levels growth in our retirement and brokerage accounts. Although modest, most of the 3,000 dollar gain was due to our stock accounts, primarily growth in shares of AAV and PCU.
3) Savings Bonds and Prosper. Well, just to give you a sense of whats NOT working in terms building wealth. Whats NOT working is our investments in US Savings Bonds and prosper.com. The bonds aren’t working largely because the interest rate they pay is really low. Prosper hasn’t been working out quite as well as we’d like because the when we started lending it was to individuals with bad credit. Naturally, this month another one of our borrowers flaked out. We changed our strategy last month, so hopefully our deadbeat quotient will remain steady.
Click on the picture below for the juicy details.
Best,
James
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