Wow, another great month for growing my stash! No complaints here just pure growth with a new surprise investment.
Income
This month I made $3,758 after my contributions to my 401K. It was dividend time and I sold a car spoiler as well. I love receiving dividends! I also decided to start selling things around my place I don’t want or use. Still, have a few more items I’m hoping to sell over the next few months to bring in around $700-$1,000.
Expenses
Expenses total right at $1,677. Nothing fancy going on here. I spent $221 at the dealership to put on new tires, wheels and get an alignment. I had these wheels and tires for about a year just sitting on my back porch waiting to be installed. My old wheels where 18-inches that came with the car when I bought it seven years ago. I love how they looked but was rough on the roads here in Mississippi. You literally would feel every bump in the road. After having the new wheels on for about a week It’s a night and day difference. My new wheels are the 15-inch gold wheels. I’ll probably clean the old ones up and try selling them.
Now onto the pretty expenses graph….
Savings
So It’s month two of the sinking funds coming back. I’m keeping it simple with one for travel and one for vehicle costs. This month I saved $2,474 which is right around a 53% savings rate.
- $1,106 Roth 401K
- $1,168 Money Market
- $100 Travel Sinking Fund
- $100 Maintenance Sinking Fund
Net Worth: $96,800
This is where it gets a little sticky now. My net worth posted on Personal Capital in the sleek graph below is wrong. Rember when I said there was a new surprise investment? That investment would not link to Personal Capital. The investment is CryptoCurrency. I can already hear the mob rioting up to get me.
Everyone has a very different take on that as an investment. I am one that advises against it until you have a basic understanding of financial principles and a good base of wealth. After that, I see nothing wrong with risking 1%-2% of your wealth in a risky investment. I mainly did it so I can write about it here for all of you to learn from. This way you can see my successes or failures with it at no cost to you. Now CyrptoCurrency’s have crazy volatility! As of two days ago, my total balance was around $1,800. So in two days, it dropped almost $400. Just to show how crazy volatile it is as I am typing this my account is now at $1,520. So almost a $100 increase in literally about 5 minutes.
That is a +$3,831 gain since last month net worth update for November was $92,969.
Final Thoughts
It’s been a crazy year for me as far as my journey goes. I have learned so much about investing and finances in general. I have accomplished so much this year and feel blessed to be apart of this community. I’m looking forward to what challenges 2018 will bring and how much more I can grow my stash. Remember life is not all about money, it’s simply a tool to use wisely. I have also learned how to spend my time more wisely on what brings me value and ultimately happiness. I am so thankful for being able to help so many people this year with the beginning steps of them creating the life they desire. I’m still not positive what my end goal is for the CryptoCurrency. I have three scenarios I could choose.
- Have a certain profit goal.
- Just let it ride as a buy and hold investment.
- Sell enough to get initial investment back and let the rest ride as a buy and hold investment.
My first thoughts were to just get a certain profit and sell it and pay any capital gains taxes on it. Then I was leaning toward selling just enough to get my initial investment back, this way if it all went down the toilet I’d have never lost a dime. But now I’m really considering just letting it ride for twelve months so once I sell it would be considered long-term capital gains. My secret is I’d get my tax bracket low enough that I would pay ZERO in capital gains. I plan to tackle this choice in the next few weeks.