Net Worth Update April 2018

Net Worth as of April 30, 2018

Last year I posted how it was never too late to start saving for FIRE. Well, recently, I thought it would be a good idea to track our progress every six months and see how we're doing. Granted, the last "update" was a year ago and it wasn't truly an update.

One particular milestone that was noteworthy in 2018. Sometime in January of 2018, the total value of all our financial assets (cash, RRSPs, TFSAs, Pensions, etc.) exceeded the total remaining of our mortgage balance. Of course, this doesn't mean much as we cannot cash in our pensions or RESP. We also cannot cash in the entire RRSP without paying significant taxes on the balance, so really. This isn't much of a milestone.

However, because of the falseness of this milestone, I decided I needed to separate the "locked-in" accounts (mainly the RESP and the pensions that have accumulated) and the rest (cash, TFSAs, RRSPs, etc.). I'm still counting RRSP as not "locked-in" because our plan for withdrawal will result in little to no tax come income tax time.

Another point that is noteworthy is the jump of the black line on the bottom. Wifey returned to work after 1 year on maternity leave. Since she was part of a defined benefit plan, she had the option to "buy back" the year she missed and count it as time served for pension purposes. We were saving the EI and company top-up money for this reason, so we easily wrote the cheque and mailed it to the pension administrators. Of course, with her company offering a 100% match on all employee contributions, that's like a 100% return right there. Unfortunately, as it is a defined benefit plan, I don't know how to calculate the value of the pension, so I just doubled up the amount Wifey has contributed so far. Another reason to keep this total away from the total amount of financials.

The last thing of note is the amount of income tax we paid (or didn't pay) for 2017. In the linked post above, I assumed we'd be paying $7,000 to the Canada Revenue Agency for taxes. Mainly because EI doesn't take out enough taxes and Wifey was receiving a (generous) company top-up. When all the tax forms came in the mail and I entered all the figures into SimpleTax, we ended up with an owing of $1,400! Whoop. My assumption of $7,000 was way off... Now we had a small windfall of $5,600. It's for this reason we were able to max out our TFSA, RESP, and RRSP contributions for the year by March.

Aside from that, we're currently paying down the mortgage. April was the first month so you can see some progress towards the end on the graph.

The following is a summary of the numbers:

• Net worth: $586,476.74
• Total Assets: $868,848.15
• Estimated House Value: $545,000.33
• All Financials: $323,847.82
• Cash/Investments: $265,802.53
• RESP/Pensions: $58,045.29
• Remaining Mortgage: $282,371.41