Violet Sky

I meant to post more last month, but between personal travel and work travel, there was only a week where I was not either recovering from a trip or preparing for one, so I suppose I’ll kick off this month and do a better job planning some of the topics I’ve had on my mind.

What a roller coaster this month was! At its peak, we nearly touched $1.4MM in net worth and my upcoming stock vest was looking pretty nice as the company stock climbed. Instead, we ended the month with a slightly declined net worth and a less than inspiring potential vest – at least there are a few weeks left on the latter issue.

In any case, our cash took quite a hit this month, between vacation expenses, a moderately pricey car repair, and deploying some more of the cash into our brokerage, but we still have a fair amount on hand. Our home value took a fairly large hit, for reasons I haven’t looked into, so despite a solid climb in our invested assets, everything else net declined and thus tugged our net worth down with it.

On the plus side, we’re approaching a million in invested assets. Long ago, that sounded very exciting, but as we sit here at almost $950k, I find the numbers way more abstract that I expected. It does make me wonder how hitting our number will feel – hopefully less abstract!

Thanks to the transfer of another $25k into our brokerage, the balance on our brokerage is now higher than the balance remaining on our mortgage. I had forgotten that I’d put a little conditional statement on my net worth spreadsheet to alert me when that happened, so I did have an, “Oh, neat!” moment when I updated our net worth tracker and that cell lit up with the good news. Obviously we’re not going to be paying off our 2.875% mortgage any time soon, but it’s a nice milestone to know that if we really needed to, we could live mortgage-free (if not capital gains-free).