In the same respect that February 2007 was not the best, March provided significant improvement for my bottom line. My liquid accounts are up more than 21%, and my investments (including contributions) are up 9.69%.
Over the past few months, I started separating my business assets, but now that I’ve given it some thought, I’m not sure it makes sense to do so. I’ll keep it as is this month, but this will probably change back in the future.
Keep reading this entry to see my latest monthly balance sheet followed by more detailed notes.
I’ve more than doubled my uninvested cash over the last year. So why not invest more of it? Well, my lease is up at the end of June, and I’ll have to make some decisions. Right now, I still don’t really have enough cash to make a 20% down payment on even the most affordable condominium in my area, so I need to build up this cash as much as possible.
Note: In March, I opened the Electric Orange checking account at ING Direct.
I’ve adjusted the value of my 2004 Honda Civic to take an expense for “depreciation” over the last few months, spread out evenly. If I had to sell my Civic now, I think I could probably get $10,350 for it, but that’s probably the absolute highest I could sell it for.
In terms of investments, this month I had $4861.03 in deposits and $542.98 in market returns. $3,000 of those deposits were in my new SEP IRA at Vanguard at the end of the month. Since deposited, my VTSMX investment is already down about $20.
March 31 marked the end of the first contribution period for my Company Stock Purchase Plan. With the funds in this account accumulated so far, I will be able to purchase stock at a 15% discount from the lower of the price on the opening day or closing day of this period.
Happily, I had no out-of-the-ordinary expenses in March, so my credit card balance is back to what I would consider “normal” for the end of the month. This credit card is only used for expenses to earn cash back. I pay the entire balance off each month. Now that my landlords do not accept credit cards for rent payments, my cash back earnings will be significantly less.
My car loan will be paid off within six months, but my student loans are slowly decreasing. My payment to the loan’s principal is slightly less than my payment to the loan’s interest. I should perhaps consider increasing my payments beyond the minimum allowed by the lender. The interest rate is relatively low, but I don’t want to be paying this loan off from too much longer.
I’m in Santa Barbara, California today, and I’m not quite in the mood to put together my income statement. I’d much rather enjoy the beautiful weather. It may be another day or two until I post my income statement, but if you’ve subscribed to my RSS feed you won’t miss it. Nor will you miss all the great guest posts I have scheduled for this week.
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The stock market downturn on February 27 probably screwed up a lot of people’s net worth. I thin my investments averaged down about 6% that day alone.
Looks like you had another great month!
Nobody has 20% down anymore ;)
congrats on another positive month!
your 2006 to 2007 improvement is impressive.
Jon & MT: Thanks!
Congrats Flexo you’re doing very well