I have always been interested in saving as a young kid. After I graduated from college, I moved to Boston, MA and started working in the mutual fund industry. I remember my first mutual fund purchase was the Scudder Global Fund in the late eighties. I later ended up working for Scudder funds and started to form my early investment plans which was to put to save as much for retirement in my 401(k) as I could afford.
I got married in 1994 with a couple of thousands dollars in cash and about $26K in my 401(k) plan. This is how we started out and we worked together to set some goals for our investing. We started tracking our net worth for the fist time in June 1999 and we had a net worth of $264,751. I then started tracking our net worth twice a year at the end of June and December using an Excel spreadsheet. I now have a more formal plan to determine how much we will need at retirement which I update at the end of each year.
These days I enter our net worth each month on NetworthIQ. This is a great site to see how you compare to your peers and you can tell as little or a much about yourself as you like. You can compare your net worth to others by income, age, state and many others factors. Tracking ones net worth each month might be a little too much but it is fun to see how it has changed from the previous month. It only takes a few minutes to get started with NetworthIQ. I now have linked my site to the NetworthIQ site that shows a graph of my net worth.
Take a look at NetworthIQ. Remember you can't find your way if you don't have a good road map.
Tracking Net Worth
Posted by Div Guy | Tuesday, February 05, 2008 | 401(k) plans, investing, mutual fund, Net Worth, retirement | 4 comments »
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I thoroughly enjoyed this post. It is quite interesting to me to learn something about the person on the other side of the screen. I plan to include your article in my weekly carnival/article review this Friday.
Best Wishes,
D4L
D4L,
Thanks for including me in your weekly carnival!
My problem with tracking my networth is that I tend to track it every single day. I used to have a short-term trading mindset, where I would track it hourly, but over the years it got exhausting. I have learned that if I want to be here over the long run i have to use data with as little noise as possible - so monthly or quarterly checks on net worth should be a fine indicator. (even though i still check my worth every day ;-))
I read somewhere that rich people can always tell you how much they are worth, whereas people with very little in terms of assets do not know the answer to that question. I am not rich, but I guess I am getting there..
Div Guy, I am just wondering if you had a long-term monetary goal to achieve?
Div Growth,
I am trying to grow my retirement assets from $500K to $2M in the next 15 years.