Wednesday, July 3, 2019

Five Years of Tracking My Net Worth

Andy Warhol's Dollar Sign (1981)

Just like that, and we're already halfway through 2019.  

I was listing down my expenses and realized that I've been tracking down my finances for five years now. 2015 was a milestone year for the following reasons: 
  1.  I started working two jobs. That means double the salary, which had to go somewhere. 
  2.  I finally opened a brokerage account after months of studying. 
  3.  I slowly transferred the cash (that's been sitting around in savings--I know!) into equities. 
As you can see, I haven't exactly been the most consistent person. There were gaps in the data, like certain periods where for some reason I did not fill in all the variables for certain data points. 

Story of my (stocks) life. 

But because I wanted to have some sort of accomplishment for the first half of the year, I played around with making charts in Google Sheets. I'm still a newbie on that point so even if I wanted to see how cash migrated to equities plus all the other components of one's net worth, I have to be satisfied with what I came up with so far. 

The blue bars show how my net worth was inching up to seven digits. In 2015, I had most of my holdings in cash and opened my COL account around July. I had a bit of a windfall because I found out that where I worked at the time (CoRK) got my pay rate wrong, and so they owed me money that amounted to 6 digits. They gave it in one go, which meant there was also a huge tax cut. But still, I was determined to invest that money so that I had something to show for it. 

Another bit of a throwback: I remember that period in July-August when the prices of stocks suddenly fell because of fears that Greece would default. I saw that sharp drop down but didn't buy anything because, well, I was a newbie. Still a lot of things of learn. 

My net worth peaked in the First Quarter of 2018--which coincidentally was when my stocks holdings were also at their highest. I remember being so happy that I qualified for the next tier at the brokerage--until I didn't because stock prices dropped. (This was also when my medical expenses started to balloon--probably more connections there I should explore.) My biggest regret is not cashing in enough on those equities, which have since gone down to half its former value. But I'm not really that worried. I have accepted that the price of stocks go up and down. My time horizon is long. Almost 50% of my net worth is in equities. But for the most part, as long as I don't panic and sell everything, I'm hoping that those values will still go up. 

I still feel like I'm an Under Accumulator of Wealth. There are many things I can still do to improve my net worth. I'm going to be more diligent, I should go back to updating the sheets I made specifically for expenses. That way, I can see where my money is going (Grab rides, sadly) and make more cool handy charts. 

How is your 2019 so far? 

1 comment:

Jillsabs said...

I love how net worth spreads are our version of "Facebook memories".

Looking back at my net worth, I can also pinpoint the time when our finances were demolished because of my husband's back-to-back health issues. Sad times but we survived so that only made us stronger.

I'll be investing in equities again pretty soon so that's something to be excited and obsess over. It will be COL Financial Part Two so I'm hoping that this time I'll be a wiser and more savvy investor.