Net Worth in April 2007

I haven’t calculated our net worth for a few months, but I knew it was going in the right direction. Selling my ring and the gift from my parents helped a lot over the last couple months. Our net worth right now is $77,386. That’s about a $6500 increase since January, but it’s short of where we need to be in order to meet our goal of increasing our net worth by $20,000 in 2007.

The big improvements we’ve made are in our retirement accounts and credit card debt. The only credit card debt we have is on our zero percent interest Discover Card, which we’re paying down at a faster rate than we had been over the last few years. It should be paid off by the end of the year (that will be a very good day!) On the retirement account front, we’ve continued making our monthly contributions to our IRAs, and I also have a 457 plan at the library, since I got a promotion in January. We put $500 from the sale of my ring into a Roth IRA, which is where I will be stashing all my retirement funds going forward. I cancelled my contributions to my traditional IRA as of this month. We’re going to do the same for my husband soon. We’re not going to convert our traditional IRAs to Roths because we just can’t afford to pay the taxes we would be charged to do that. So we’re just going to let them sit there, without putting any more money into them. And we’ll work at building up the Roths instead. We’ve also started putting money into an HSA, and it’s worth $618 now. That’s our baby fund – we have to have $3000 to pay the midwife we plan to use when we have a baby. When we have a baby, we’ll deliver at home, and home-birth midwives are not covered by insurance, so we have to save up the money ahead of time. We’re 20% of the way there!

I’ve noticed that houses similar to ours have been selling in our neighborhood lately for around $210k – $215k . And our lot is one of the best in the neighborhood – most of the houses just back up to other houses, but ours backs up to a huge open space and a playground. The houses behind us are about 400 yards away – I think that increases the value of our property a bit. But although it would be nice to just put our house value at $215k and say that we’re nearly there in terms of our net worth goal for this year, I think that would be cheating. So I’m just going to leave the value of our house where it is. We’re not planning to sell anytime soon (ever!) so it’s really just a meaningless value anyway. It’s nice to know that our house is appreciating – we bought it 4.5 years ago for $190k – but not at a crazy over-inflated pace.