Year: 2015

Goals And Budget Update Feb 2015

Budget Guy Budgeting, Goals

Update for Feb 2015:

Brokerage Investment Goal:

  • Feb Investments contributions were $1102.92
  • YTD Investments contributions are at $1962.77
  • Outlook: Green – everything’s on track.

Roth IRA Investments Goal:

  • Feb Investments were $400
  • YTD Investments total $800
  • Outlook: Green – everything’s on track.

Cash Flow Goal:

  • Feb was cash flow positive, with $839.67 $839.57* being added to the bank accounts
  • YTD is at a positive $13.77 $13.67 net cash flow
  • Outlook: Yellow at this time since planned spending has me slightly below target.  Though it’s very early in the year and since I am very conservative in my estimates I anticipate some expenses being less than planned, which will move this green.

Additional Mortgage Principal Stretch Goal:

  • Feb was $0
  • YTD is $0
  • Outlook: Green.  I anticipate making my first principal-only payment of $1,500 in March when I get my bonus.  Making this payment relies on some assumptions I’ve made when it comes to my bonus at work.  I am estimating around $8,000 (pre-tax) for my bonus, but won’t know for sure if I’m right until mid-March. If I over-estimated, I’ll have some work to do to refactor the budget for the year.

Feb2015GoalsUpdated

*Updated 3/3/2015: It appears I entered the wrong number for one of my gas purchases, resulting in a $0.10 difference.  Oh the joys of manual entry! Screenshot updated.

Keep track of the progress over at the 2015 goals page.

Net Worth Feb 2015

Budget Guy Net Worth

As of February 28, 2015, my net worth went up by $7,058.30 $7,058.20*, to a total of $139,586.22 $139,586.12*.  This went up primary due to increases in retirement, cash, brokerage accounts, and escrow.  This was partially offset by an increase in property tax liabilities, and a decrease in pre-paid expenses.

Retirement and brokerage were the ones that shined this month.  I contributed a total of $615 to 401(k), including my employer’s match.  Another $400 went to Roth IRA, and another $1,102 went to brokerage.  The rest of the increase was due to market appreciation.

Feb2015NetWorth

*Updated 3/3/2015: Due to a typo when I entered one of my gas receipts, I actually have $0.10 less of net worth than originally posted.  Screenshot updated to reflect numbers as of end of Feb.

See the Net Worth Tracker page.

MyBudgetWorld.com – My First Ever Domain Name

Budget Guy Site Updates
Screen capture of my new domain from godaddy.
Screen capture of my new domain from godaddy.

I finally “splurged” and spent the $40 to buy my very first domain name (mybudgetworld.com) and point it to my wordpress blog.  While I work in the IT world, I never cared to purchase a domain name.  But now that I have one, it is kind of cool to be able to call this my own.

I have to say the process was mostly painless. I registered it on GoDaddy (who sneakily tries to “upsell” your domain purchase to 2 years while showing the “sale price” at a one year rate).  You have to change the default drop-down in your cart from 2 year to 1 year if you only want it for that long.  My only complaint is that it was not very intuitive and took me several minutes to figure out why my cart showed a much higher rate than the advertised price.

The wordpress referral was very easy though – props to the wordpress folks for making the instructions clear, and relatively cheap at $13 / year.

I’ll give this a try for a year and cancel the renewals if I decide it’s not worth the expense.  Every dollar spent matters when you’re trying to achieve FIRE after all!