I’ve spent the last decade of my life focused on my finances. I started because I had no money and a job that was taking more from me than it was providing in income. I knew I had to make some changes if I wanted to build any kind of future for myself. Soon into this journey, I founded this website, where I’ve written about my own financial situation and tracked my balances on a monthly basis.

Over the years, my financial situation has improved. Rather than focusing on and tracking every cent as I was doing in 2003, a necessary step to train myself to save money and value everything I was earning, I now am significantly more relaxed. I still track my bank account balances. Eventually, I stopped tracking every cent I spent with cash. Cash spending became such a small percentage of each month’s income that it became unnecessary for me to enter every receipt (or every remembered transaction for those where no receipt was provided) into Quicken. I have been using credit cards for most expenses. (I was using credit cards to take advantage of rewards, which I didn’t start doing until I was out of debt, spending less than I was earning, and making conscious spending decisions.) The credit cards helped me carefully track my expenses.

My ability to improve my financial condition has been partly due to my public tracking. When my numbers are published online, I have to admit to my mistakes and accept criticism from readers when it’s due. Knowing that I will be reporting the details of my bank accounts helps me to continue making good decisions with my money.

At the end of the year, I take the chance to look at my life from a broader perspective. I now have ten years of history in my Quicken file. I’ll be thirty-six years old in a couple of months, so my finances have been a focus for almost all of my adult life. And for those of you, readers, who know me only through this site, only as “Flexo” or Luke Landes, you may think that an obsession with personal finance rules my life. The good news is that this isn’t true; outside of Consumerism Commentary, when I see my friends and family, personal finance is not usually a topic of discussion.

With ten years of history in Quicken, I can easily see my own financial progress over time. At the end of 2001, the world was still shaking from terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., and my life was uncertain. With no money, no job, no girlfriend, and no place to live, I knew I needed to make changes in my life. That’s what I did.

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I’ve been tracking my net worth and keeping my finances updated in personal finance management software since July 2003. I’ve done this mainly for myself. Posting my finances online helps make the numbers real. I use these monthly reports to hold myself accountable. If I write publicly about spending more in a budget category than I should, I have no one to blame myself if, at the end of the following month, I still have the same problem. I would have to face the judgment of readers who see my lack of progress. By keeping my finances public, I try to hold my money-related decisions to a high standard.

Over the past eight and a half years, this technique has helped me gain financial independence, combined with a thriving business. But this will be the final month I share my balances with this much detail. I’m moving into the next phase of my financial journey, and this requires taking back some of my willingness to bare all for an audience. I will still share quite a bit, more than most readers would expect, but the familiar balance sheet will be replaced with a different accountability measure.

Another reason to move away from posting a monthly balance sheet for accountability is the fact that the swings from month to month have more to do with stock market performance than day-to-day money management decisions. When I had very little money invested and my expenses were close to my income, every decision I made could have a strong effect on my finances. That is not the case today. Just like my need for tracking every cent has been relinquished as my budget began to allow more freedom, my daily spending has a smaller effect than decisions pertaining to the larger picture, like my investment portfolio allocation and diversification. I’ll be writing more about my investment choices in the future.

In October, my investments recovered. This contributed to an increase in my net worth. Continue reading to see the numbers.

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