Violet Sky

It was a little rocky throughout the month, but ultimately it was another steady climb up to new net worth and invested asset heights. When we got later in the year last year and I hadn’t dropped in the remaining $25k I intended to put in our brokerage, we decided to take $14k of that money and use it to max our backdoor Roth IRAs right at the start of the year. The remaining $9k is still lingering in our HYSA for reasons that I’ll elaborate on shortly.

It might be apparent from the change in savings and car values, but we bought a new car this month. I really thought that I would end up taking out a loan when we bought a fourth (!) car, but when it came down to it, my husband pointed out that we have enough cash to cover the balance and pay ourselves back at 0% over time.

As much as I love the security blanket of extra cash, I hate car payments even more, so it may be time to retire the car loans section of this table (though I will still continue to track it on my spreadsheet, to maintain historical accuracy, of course). Additionally, since we just threw $19k and $14k to the car and our IRAs respectively, I’m going to hang onto the remaining $9k until we’ve made progress paying ourselves back. See earlier comment about cash safety blanket.

We’ll see how the rest of the month shakes out. I’m expecting a rough February as the president’s bizarre usage of tariffs against our allies rolls through the financial markets. I hope I’m wrong!