Net Worth Update April 2020

Net worth as of April 30, 2020

These last six months has been a roller coaster ride. Stocks were up! Stocks were down! Stocks have been slowly climbing up again. Additionally, for the first time ever, the Loonie household are millionaires... paper millionaires at least. It helps when our condo is worth over $848,000.

Due to the closure of non-essential businesses to prevent the spread of COVID-19, stocks tanked in late February to late March. At one point, our investment portfolio was down over $60,000! That's a huge chunk of change. However, rather than panic and sell everything, I put as much money as we could into the stock market.

While most of the extra funds we had were put into the emergency fund, some extra was put into our investments. For the month of March and April, we were able to invest an additional $30,000. Some of this money was from existing group RRSPs at work and company match money. Another source of funds came from our paycheques that haven't been affected so far. A third source of funds came from Chinese RMB in our safe. We have been collecting money for a while now. We've been receiving money from wifey's relatives abroad for years, but didn't do anything with the money aside from put it in the safe. Well, with the RMB to CAD exchange hovering around 5.00, we figured now would be as good a time as any to exchange the money and maybe put the money to work. In all the years of us collecting the money, I never thought to count it. I didn't realize we had that much money in there. In addition to RMB, we also have Hong Kong Dollars from my relatives. I think the amount is roughly 2,500 HKD, so I don't think it's worth the effort to exchange. A quick Google search tells me it's worth around $450.

Starting in late March, the stock markets started to rally. By the end of April, stocks are roughly at the same point as July/August 2019. However, with the extra money we put in over this time, our investments are worth more than what they were in October 2019. If you factor in the extra $30,000, our investments are only down $5,000 or so from the end of February. This doesn't factor in the gains on the $30,000. Assuming it's 10%, our investments are only down $8,000. Of course, this is just rough napkin math. I know for the year, we're down 4%, so that's not bad considering at the worst point, we were down almost 15-20% for the year.

Of course, we didn't want to recklessly throw all of our extra cash into the stock market, despite being "free" money. For any extra, we put a portion into the mortgage and the rest into investments. As for our mortgage prepayment plan of paying $1,000 a week total into the mortgage, we scrapped that plan in late January when it became clear money would be tight with wifey's company's group RRSP and share purchase plan taking up a huge chuck of wifey's gross salary. Additionally, the plan was to save some money for a trip to China and potentially save some more money into the RRSPs when the Canada Revenue Agency returned our Notice of Assessments. The global pandemic threw a wrench into the idea of travelling with borders internationally being closed and demand for flights lessening.

As a result of the mortgage prepayment plan shifting around, my goal of having a sub $210,000 mortgage by the end of April 2020 was a pipe dream. The more realistic goal of having a sub $215,000 mortgage by the end of April 2020 was just missed by $361.20! Just two more mortgage payments would bring the total below the $215,000 threshold. If no further extra prepayments are made, the mortgage will drop below $210,000 by the second week of September 2020. However, it would be nice if we had the total was below $200,000 by the October 2020 update. It's doable on paper. Given the current climate, it's hard to predict what we would spend our money on, if we would still have jobs by then, or if we change gears again and shift all of the extra money into investments instead of splitting it between investments and mortgage prepayments.

I cannot even imagine what will happen over the next 6 months.

The following is a summary of the numbers for the April 2020 update:

• Net worth: $1,061,152.60 (+$66,799.27)
• Total Assets: $1,276,513.79 (+$44,882.61)
• Estimated House Value: $848,435.08 (+$8,435.08)
• All Financials: $428,078.71 (+$36,447.53)
• Cash/Investments: $358,979.15 (+$35,550.12)
• RESP/Pensions: $69,099.56 (+$897.41)
• Remaining Mortgage: $215,361.19 (-$21,916.66)