January numbers:
- Personal:
- Gross monthly W2 pay: $5,375
- Net monthly W2 pay: $3,387
- Total credit card debt: $28,776 (+$3,994)
- Total other non-mortgage debt: $6,711 +$1,846)
- Total mortgage debt: $156,773 (+$2,165)
- Cash/cash equivalents: $14,696 (+$364)
- Total retirement savings: $171,127 (+$6,110)
- Non-Equity Net worth: $-6,437 (-$1,530)
- Total Net Worth: $220,863 (+$2,772)
Everything continues to be awful. Over the past month and a half I’ve had $3,200 in car repairs, the end of the expenses for the new house, the payment for a $3,500 roof landed, an additional $640 roof repair section, a $158 lock replacement needed, a $650 window repair. Pending expenses are a roughly $2,000 furnace replacement in progress, and a $1,000 plumbing repair that has dragged on entirely too long (can’t wait to fire those plumbers)! I have exhausted my contingency funds, so all of this spending is going on my HELOC (after cycling through my Chase Sapphire Reserve so I get the extra 30 days of float and points). I had moved HELOC balance to a 0% card offer earlier, with the expectation that would be the last bucket of money I’d have to do that with. I was wrong. So when all this lands I’ll do another 0% transfer and kick these cans down the line. Yay.
The one bright light in the last little bit has been the new house. The refinance into a 30 year loan at 3.5% has been completed as of Monday. I will be paying a nominal amount of PMI, but it’ll be worth it to lock in a low rate. The loan to value (LTV) is 87% (a $50,915 mortgage balance against the refi appraisal of $58,000) so it’ll be some time until I get that paid down to the 80% LTV needed to eliminate PMI. My monthly payment on that property will go up to $404 (from about $276) but it’ll be fixed for the next 30 years. This is why (as you can see above) my non-equity net worth went down, but my total net worth went up. The $58,000 value of the new property added a chunk of unrealized equity to my bottom line. Doesn’t help cash flow, but makes me feel warm and fuzzy.
And of course, this is all going to get worse before it gets better. I’ve got a little over $5,000 in payments to credit cards outstanding. Those will land on my HELOC before the February update. I also have another nice chunk of change (the furnace and plumbing mentioned above) that haven’t been invoiced yet. I’ll spread those payments out as long as I can, but we’re looking at credit/HELOC balances increasing precipitiously for the next 30-60 days at least. It’s demoralizing as all hell if I’m honest. All I can really do is liquidate as many collectibles as I can as quickly as possible. We’ll see how that goes.
I already outlined some of the future posts you’ll see, but we can add to the list a few topics – how much money I owe myself (and why/where from) and a longer-term living plan for the year. In the meantime, hope you enjoy and please pray to the lottery gods for me. I could use as much unexpected money over the next few months as possible.
