Net Worth Update: August 2012

I’m back to living with my wife.  Big shocker, I know; a man wanting to be able to live with his beloved and all, but for the past two years, I haven’t been able to do so.  Around this time in 2010, I was moving into my apartment about an hour away, getting settled in for my education that was going to be years of effort in a neighboring state.  At the time, it seemed like it would be quick and easy; the only reason I got the apartment at all is that the hour commute to and from the school seemed a bit on the far side to try to complete every day, as much as I wanted to come back to my then-fiancee every night.

Skip ahead two years, and things are completely different.  The apartment is gone, the educational part of my degree is over, my research is nearly (I hope) complete, and I finally get to return to my wife and live together as husbands and wives should.  At least, unless I get hired in a job that forces me to move halfway across the country…  But that’s for the next chapter in my life; as I do my best to finish off THIS chapter, I can at least say that I’m going to get to wake up next to my wife every day for the foreseeable future.  It’s amazing how much that can make me feel better.

Anyway, enough for the thoughts of snuggles with my wife, it’s time for the purpose of this article: to share how things are going with me, financially.  July was a pretty busy month, so let’s see how things turned out:

Overall, not too bad of a month.  My investments are doing pretty well, my bank accounts are still pretty healthy, and my debt… Well, I’m starting to make a dent in the credit card debt, but the student loan debt is also going to be tough to eliminate.  As I’m currently being charged more in interest from the Fed Loan student loan than in either of the credit cards, it’s going to take some effort; but that’s the goal, after all, isn’t it?  There’s some good news in the Alexa ranking, although as I was down to 121,000 at one point, it could be better.  On that subject, let’s look at how my progress on my goals for the year is going:

My blogging income is doing pretty well, although not nearly where I would like it.  (Granted, I would like it to be over $10,000 per month, but still, higher than this would be nice.)  I haven’t been able to make a charitable donation for the past two months, although I’m hoping to do so in the near future.  (Perhaps when my blogging income is closer to my goals, or at least higher than right now.)

The biggest difference a truly dedicated reader might notice is that my credit card pay down amount is much lower than last month, or the past several months, for that matter.  I’ve double checked my math, and discovered that my calculations have been off.  So, I modified my current calculation (as well as the Last Month value, in case you were wondering how that got lower as well), and now it shows properly how much I need to achieve to meet my goal of eliminating $5000 of my credit card debt.  I still have a lot to do there (I’ve managed to add over three thousand dollars in debt, unfortunately), but it’s a bit more accurate now.

All in all, not too shabby of a month.  I just need to do more to achieve my goals (which is what August is for), and I’ll have even better results to report at the start of next month.  Here’s to a great end of the summer.