Goal Update: End Of April 2018

At the end of each month, I post an update of my goals, including a brief discussion of any notable events that might have occurred during the month. The latest month's figures can always be found under the Featured menu in the menu bar at the top of the blog.

Last updated: End of April, 2018
Current value: $41,231
Change from last Month: +188
Percent of Goal:  37.92%

Note that the funds in this account are invested in stock, so there will be fluctuations in value that are outside my control. I never withdraw money from this account, so any dips are purely due to stock price changes.

Events Of Note Last Month:

My SQL courses on Udemy generated $116.84 of income. My courses on SkillShare earned $18.86, which is a drop from the $42.25 from last month. It's still higher than the $10 in February though. I also earned $101.62 from ads on my blogs. (That represents almost a full year of ad revenue. Yeah, I'm not working hard to monetize this blog.) Despite all of that income, plus the $600 I regularly contribute to this fund each month, my increase over last month's total was less than $200. Sometimes the stock market sucks.

And speaking of sucky things, I had an unexpected car repair bill in the amount of $1,850. The sunroof on my Prius would not open. First world problem, I know. Actually, if that was the only issue, I would have left it, but it did open a tiny bit before stopping. When I tried to close it, it may or may not have closed completely but when I turned the car off, I got a warning beep indicating that I had a window open, so I wasn't sure it really did close. Given the frequent rain we get here in Washington, I didn't feel it was worth taking the risk of having a leak ruin the inside of my car, so I took it in to the shop for repairs. It turns out the motor that drives the sun roof had somehow died. To replace it, they had to take pretty much the whole headliner apart. A $600 motor plus a lot of labor charges equals a big bill.

Still, I really can't complain too much. I do have a car repair budget / savings account and it had enough funds to cover this. That's not to say I enjoyed forking out that much. All in all, I have no complaints about the car. It's 8 years old with 140,000 miles. It's been fully paid off for at least 6 years. This was the first major repair I ever had to do to it. Heck, I haven't even had to replace the original brake pads yet.

Net Worth Update

I was shocked to see our net worth went up $15,235 this month, which puts us just $3,000 under our December net worth. We're also less than $4,000 away from what I believe was our all-time high set back in May of 2017.

This was a total surprise to me. It didn't really feel like our investments were gaining ground this month. The only figure I was somewhat monitoring closely was the Tesla account and that went down. It turns out, my feeling was correct:

March 2018

April 2018

As you can see, it wasn't our investments that caused the jump in our net worth - it was our house. Zillow says it increased in value by almost exactly $20,000 in April. I've said the Seattle area is a crazy real estate market and at some point, prices will come down. So right now, this feels like a bit of a hollow victory. 



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