Note: This is a repost from an old blog of mine, remixed with the graphs, headings ordering, and stylizations I normally do, but otherwise the text is unchanged. Hope you enjoy taking a look back at where this all began! -CJ
Hello readers! For those who are new, these are my monthly posts where I share all the details of my progress on my FIRE journey!
May was a good month, with things starting to feel a bit more normal again. Now fully vaccinated, I took a short trip down to Florida since my friend has been staying down there with her parents since the beginning of the year. Got to enjoy the beach and eat at a lot of good restaurants. All in all a good time. The new job continues to be a good time, but with my current manager, who I worked with in the past, putting in his two weeks I’m not sure how much longer it’s going to stay that way. I’m gonna try to keep a good attitude about things but by the end of June I think we’ll be seeing a bit of a mass exodus.
Markets were pretty rough this month. There was a scary dip in the middle where the market went down 4%, which is becoming an amount that’s harder to stomach the more I have invested! Thankfully, things turned around and the market ended up a respectable 0.55%, much less than the last couple. No complaints by me! Let’s get into the numbers!
May 2021 – $139,168.24 (+$5,984.55)
Considering how much money I spent in Florida, I’m happy with this! I had a little help from a payout of my PTO from my previous job, but otherwise it was a little help from the market and a lot from my paychecks this month! Still feeling pretty good about hitting my goal of $150k by my birthday (July 15th) considering I have three paychecks and hopefully a bit more help from the market. We shall see!
401k – $58,056.06 (+$3,451.93)
Similar to last month, I had about $3k come in from my paychecks (including the very last one from my old employer), and then just a bit of market movement on top. In case I haven’t said it enough times, this is all invested in the S&P 500!
Brokerage – $30,644.75 (+$5,496.95)
A bigger jump than you’d expect here! So I put my usual $3k in at the beginning of the month and saw a bit of growth as in my Roth IRA. Towards the end of the month, as the AMC boom was happening, I decided to throw a couple thousand at it. At first it seemed like a terrible idea, and was down $300 at one point, but then when I was up $100 I just sold. That’s, of course, before it went up 100% in a single day. At least I didn’t lose money! I also threw $150 in some altcoins (baby’s first crypto purchase!) and proceeded to lose about $50 of that. Well, so much for that! I have to pull that money I had in AMC back to my bank account when I think of it.
Roth IRA – $28,021.68 (+$1,192.78)
Just a slight bit of market growth here on top of my contributions. June is my final $1,000 contribution for the year, so I’ll start directing that towards brokerage in July. Til’ next year Roth IRA!
Cash – $17,489.40 (-$4,462.95)
A big drop here! This makes sense to me though, since I had about $4k come in from paychecks, $4k go out for Roth IRA and Brokerage at the beginning of the month, and then about $1k for donations, $2k later on for more brokerage (I’ll get to that below) and then just monthly expenses. Honestly, could’ve been a lot worse! Still definitely have a huge chunk of cash that I’d rather was invested but I’ll get that sorted this month.
HSA – $4,956.35 (+$305.84)
A couple employer contributions here and just the tiniest movement on the invested funds. I’ve been doing a good job holding all of my receipts for medical expenses so I can pull this money out tax free later in life!
Hope you enjoyed this net worth report! Happy saving!