Tracking Finances: Quarter 3
Updated: Feb 22, 2019
Quarter 3 and I saw more eye to eye. This was an up and down, but a little bit up, quarter for the stock market, rising from around 24,100 to 25,414 today, up around 5%. My portfolio did a bit better, up around 6.67%. That's largely due to the out-sized performance of my "fun money" ETF, ARKW, which was up about 17% in the same period.
I also switched from PRF, a fundamental index fund, over to VTI, a more traditional market cap index fund. If you want to follow my thoughts on why I did that, feel free to read about it here.
Saving went well, but not amazingly this quarter, largely because I hit my savings target in May, and I had to pay an extra $600 due to a visa screw up for flying out of Dubai. Also, for this month, I'm saving less due to the fact that I'm travelling for summer break. The month's not over, but I think I'll save about $1000 this month. For the Quarter, I saved around $4500, which also helped my net worth.
Altogether, my net worth is up $10,500 for the quarter, up to right around $113,000. That's up over 9% for just one quarter.
In terms of my current asset allocation, it's still a bit heavy on cash, as I need to be able to cover my other rent check (six months rent) which will be taken out at the end of August. As soon as that is done, and I'm reimbursed (partly) by my school, I'll be adding the next chunk to my investments.
Recently, Real Estate has begun to get very interesting to me, especially turnkey single family homes like those provided through www.roofstock.com and I was thinking that instead of just putting my next $20,000 into my portfolio, I could use it as a down payment on a rental property through roofstock. Then, for the next two years, I could do the same thing, take my usual $20,000 and use it as downpayments on rental properties. This way, at the end of 3 years, I will have 3 rental properties and my stock/bonds. At that point I can either just start plowing money back into my stocks/bonds or decide if I want more rentals. I plan on retiring in about 15 years, and figure that if I get the 3 properties now, I can have them paid off and generating good cash flow by that point.
What do you think? What am I not thinking of? I know I need cash reserves in case things break, and I'm a bit of a rookie when it comes to real estate (although I'm learning a lot now).
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