This year has been a pretty good and steady year, I feel like we’ve just been chugging along maintaining a healthy savings and investments throughout the year. Though i’ve been dabbling in cryptocurrency which I admit is a bit of a gamble and far from a sure thing.
Overview
We just passed the 400k milestone!
Our Net Worth is currently $403,975 an increase of 72.5k from December last.
Towards the end of last year the Cryptocurrency market started BOOMING, I had had my eye on Bitcoin for a while and was frusterated that I never jumped in, I told myself now or never and started to invest in the frenzy. The Crypto market was in a bubble and by March prices started to head down. Month after month crypto kept falling, insanely bitcoin went from over 19k to currently as i’m typing 3.16k most crypto coins have followed the same pattern or even done worse. Hemmoraging value.
Throughout this time, I have invested consistently a small to moderate amount of dollars into cryptocurrency atempting to buy the dips and set myself up for the next Cryptocurrency bull run. Unfortunately I invested the largest portions of cash during the December-Feburary craze so my losses are significant.
That said i’m not including any cryptocurrency value in my net worth and i’m not counting on it for my well being in retirement. I invested only what I felt I was willing to lose, now that the market is down I plan to keep investing small amounts anticipating a time where the market will boom again. These drastic drops in the market followed by big booms is not something uncommon in the short history of bitcoin.
This year in October when the stock market started to tank, I felt like it was time for me to start investing more heavily in the market, it was a decision that had been weighing on my mind for a while. I had been paying down our rental mortgage aggresively for a security blanket, however I knew that my money had much more potential in the market. Once the market was down a significant amount, I shifted my strategy in an attempt to start contributing the max amount to my 401k going forward, sure this leaves less to pay off the mortgage but I still have a goal to pay it off by the end of next year while maxing out our retirement accounts including a 401k, two Roth IRAS, and an HSA.
For my first two to three years investing I focused heavily on aquiring real estate but now I feel like we have enough eggs in that basket for the time being. Investing in companies via index funds makes a lot of sense to me, it’s probably the easiest way to invest with no maintainance, you just invest the funds and let those companies go to work for you.
On the other hand real estate can be tricky to navigate, you want to make sure you make your money going in, so finding that right property can be stressful and takes a lot of research and time and effort to not get burned.
That said, i’m extremely happy with the two properties we aquired and wouldn’t go back and change anything, i’m just ready for a more hands off investing approach for the next little while. 2019 is looking to be a great year, we’ll see how it goes!
For historical context check out a graph of our NetWorth over time.