#4 Net Worth Update – The end of the year

Dear Reader,
Welcome to the monthly Net Worth Update! You might get use to this update and honestly it is a wonderful tool for monitoring my progress towards my ultimate goal, FIRE (financial independence and early retirement). Let’s see my numbers for this month!

Summary of my Net Worth

Consolidated Net Worth in CHF: 33,394 (down -6.6% from December)

Oh boy, what a month! It has been a month of success but also a very disappointing month from a financial point of view. For the first time, my net worth has diminished (-6.6%)… It is a bit hard to accept that fact even though some non-recurring expenses annihilated my saving rate. And yes I spent more than 6K this month, which is a tremendously high number! At first sight you may think that I gave up on my golden principle: Stash some cash no matter what! But expenses are sometimes unavoidable.

One of theses expenses is the taxes for 2016 that I had to pay this month (about CHF 900.-), the other substantial expense for this month is my annual SBB/CFF subscription (mobility), which amounts to approx. CHF 2600.-. All in all, these expenses account together for CHF 3500.-, preventing me from stashing any cash this month ☹

But this month has also been a success, even though I am already working, I gave a shot at trying to have a student SBB/CFF subscription and since my student ID is still valid (until the end of January), I managed to save CHF 1100.- on a normal subscription. That’s a huge a win!

Moreover, this month I have been looking for a new bank account set up since I won’t benefit anymore from the student status in the future and thus would have to pay my bank to give them my money to play with, what a pity! Since I don’t want them to get paid for investing my money, I have been looking for alternatives and found good one!

2018 will also be the first full year of work and therefore I was looking for a Pillar 3a to reduce my future tax bill and found a great one! I will cover these two discoveries in two future articles, there is no point of finding great deals and not sharing them 😉.

Since I didn’t manage to save any dime this month, I am going frugal berserk through January! My determination to save tons of cash is higher than ever!! The “bad” month of December is basically boosting my motivation for this year and that is great 😊
I wish you a happy New Year and let’s stash some cash in 2018!

And you, how did Christmas turn out for you? Let me know in the comments section!