The $76K Project: Reboot

(Originally posted on The $76K Project on 1/19/2020) Hello, $76K readers! Just checking in with an update. Not sure yet whether it'll be a short one or a long one, as I'm not feeling particularly blogger-y today. But when I started The $76K Project, I promised myself that I'd document all of the major steps along this journey. So here I am, a reluctant writer chaining herself to her keyboard. As I outlined a couple of weeks ago, two of our 2020 goals were to (1) figure out what we're doing about our current housing situation and (2) apply for a home loan. As of today, January 19, we can check both of those items off the list. Whoop! High five! Housing has been an ongoing concern for us because it's a major chunk of our budget. Currently, our baseline monthly income (not including petsitting earnings, bonuses, or Fortysomething's occasional freelance work) is about $4600. Rent for our two-bedroom, two-bath duplex - where we've lived for nearly two years now -

Originally published on The $76K Project on 1/8/2020 Okay, real talk? That title is just an SEO gimmick. We all know I suck at how-to posts. What I'm really here to say is simply that according to Personal Capital we have finally crossed the red/green line into positive net worth territory! It has been... a road. This first graph below spans November 2017 to now. The starting number on the left is something like -$65,000. That doesn't really capture the whole picture, though, because we started overhauling our budget in April of 2017, when our net worth was more like -$80,000: Okey dokey. Moving on to the next graph, which covers the last year. In January of 2019, our net worth was -$23,000ish: Finally, here's our net worth over the past three months: The jump you see on the right doesn't reflect some magic injection of cash. It reflects the fact that until a few weeks ago, Personal Capital was unable to deal with our multiple eTrade accounts. Now it can, and so it'