October Monthly Round up

OCTOBER FINANCES ROUNDUP

Kept myself in line the entire month. I had originally given myself this budget:

And I was planning on having this budget for November:

But that budget won’t make an appearance until January 2009 when I clear my debt in full. Am waiting for tax purposes.

So how did I stack up?

I have about $200 left over. We’ll see how it goes for November. I will be spending a lot less I think because I’m actually travelling for this week and the next month as well I think. So I’ll save a ton on food.

HOURLY DISPOSABLE INCOME

I talked about this before. Your HOURLY DISPOSABLE INCOME. So when you want to go buy something expensive, you think to yourself: How many hours of work would this cost?

Calculations:
(Total Monthly Income – Total Monthly Expenses)/Hours Worked per Month = HDI

The idea is whatever your HDI is ($14.33, $25.59, whatever) you take what you want to buy (an iPod for $300 for example), and divide it by your HDI.

And that number at the end, my friends, is how much it will cost you in hours of work to buy an iPod for $300.

Back to my roundup for October.

I work about 40 hours a week. Of real, actual hours of work? Probably 30 hours a week, so let’s take that.

Working 30 actual hours:

At $110 dollars my HDI = $134.17*@ 30 hours a week

At $130 dollars my HDI = $160.83*@ 30 hours a week

Nice. Considering my expenses are only about $1500/month, and I bring in about $17,600 – $20,800 a month, my net worth is going to skyrocket at the end of 2008.

NET WORTH AND DEBT UPDATE

I couldn’t wait.

Did a little calculation and updating of my net worth and debt repayment charts.
This is from when I first started working in 2006 and when my first debt repayment started in November of that same year.

NET WORTH

My net worth includes my retirement savings (used to be around $18,000 now it’s around $13k, so I “lost” about $5k in the market, but I’m in it for the long haul so it should bounce back soon.

And my net worth got a bit of a boost in May 2007 from clearing a small little debt in full with my tax return. Then in April it took another sharper hike from another tax return, and in August it went up even sharper because I quit my corporate gig and became a freelancer.

Those are my freelancing earnings that are really pushing my net worth up, and they’ve been adjusted at a 30% tax rate just to be on the safe side and so that I don’t overestimate how much I will actually have.

I also want to put about $5k into “retirement savings” (earmarked for it), but that won’t really change my net worth. It’ll just be shifting funds around. I just want to take advantage of the cheap stocks right now.

DEBT REPAYMENT

This is my debt repayment chart from when I started paying it in November 2006. It takes a very sharp dive in January to be cleared in full because I wanted to defer payment until the new fiscal year, so that I don’t get slapped with unnecessary taxes just because I couldn’t wait 2 months to clear my debt. (We’re talking around $2000 in extra taxes, mind you).

It took some pretty sharp dives when I got my tax returns, or when I started being really aggressive with my debt repayment and just killing it.

I lived on the edge, not having an Emergency Fund over $1000. But now I have one around $3000, which will go up to around $20,000 by the end of October. (Really, mid-November when I see the money)

OVERALL

Overall, am very pleased.

I am just grateful and happy that my net worth will be shooting up (this is guaranteed income) to such a high, unexpected number, when I was down so far 2 years ago.

Let’s just hope another project is just around the corner in 2009 to keep it skyrocketing.

I need to save more money for my trip to Asia, upcoming in 2009.. plus for my move to the U.S. More on that later. I have to run the figures. I think I’ll spend about $10k in Asia, and another $10k in moving (flight, hotels, job searching). Maybe more. Like $15k.

We’ll see.