Aussie Firebug

Financial Independence Retire Early

 

Three big things to cover from last month.

1st. Joined Financial Forces With My Partner!

Because amazing things can happen when you team up with your best friend

lebron2dwade

We can refer to her as D-Wade eerrrr… I mean Miss Lady Bug

Aussie Firebug and Miss Lady Bug have officially joined financial forces and started to invest together. So everything you see from now on will the combined effort from both of us.

Now what does Miss Lady Bug bring to the table you may ask?

Well where to begin! I mean she is so fantastic, what doesn’t she bring? I couldn’t possibility say anything bad about her….. because she reads my blog…hi honey ?

But seriously. Miss Lady bug has only been working full time for technically 2 years (had a year off travelling) but has still managed to have saved around $27K since the start of the year with $2K in Super! With the only debt being her HECS debt of around $25K boosting our overall net worth by $4K.

To save $27K since the start of this year is an awesome effort I think.

Miss Lady Bug has always been sensible with money even before meeting me. I have always taken notice of these habits because I actually don’t think I could ever be with someone who was a complete n00b when it came to personal finances. I don’t expect everyone to be as frugal as me of course but just sensible with money is enough for me.

So $27K in less than a year is much better than the average.

2nd. Enter Exchanged Traded Funds (ETF’s)

With the influx of cash from Miss Lady Bug we had a decision to make.

Do we buy another investment property or start to look at something else?

I have been researching vanguard ETF’s for over a year now. Book after book I read about this investment strategy called index fund investing with a company called Vangaurd.

Now don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love property as an investment class, it has made me over $100K within 4 years. And I plan to continue to invest in it moving forward.

However!

There is this little thing called diversification. Having three properties all in Australia (different states mind you) is not very diversified.

We took the plunge and invested in the stock market.

Below is our current portfolio

portfolio-networth-oct16

You can see that property makes up 56% of our wealth. I want to get this number down and spread our wealth across multiple asset classes. Which brings us to my next point…

A new player has entered the game!

That blue slice above represents the combined valued of our ETF’s.

We have invested into three ETF’s

VAS  – The Australian market
VEU – The Entire world excluding the US
VTS  – The US market

And just like that we have essentially bought a slice of the entire worlds economy. I’m not going to go into too much strategy here but the general idea is that for me to lose my entire capital in these ETF’s 500+ of the worlds biggest companies would have to go down the shitter.

Think Apple, GM Motors, Nestle, Commonwealth Bank, Microsoft, Nissan, Nike etc. If it happened the world would have to be basically exploding.

Below are our current splits.

etf-splits-oct16

We are just going to be dumping $5K lots into each one and not worry about weighting until later.

Since the stock market changes everyday, I’m also able to track it’s progress with a lot more accuracy than the properties. Here is where we are currently sitting:

etf-worth-oct16

As you can see, we are currently down close to $1,000 already LOL. But we are in it for the long run so it’s all good 🙂

The big bumps are where we have bought more ETF’s (around $5K each time)

Third. Property Values Drop

You know how I was bragging about making over $100K in property just before?

Yeah…well you win some you lose some.

Bad month from my valuations with 2 out 3 properties going down by a total of $20K.

prop1-networth-oct16 prop2-networth-oct16 prop3-networth-oct16

*DISCLAIMER*
Various data sources (RP data, Domain.com etc.) are used in combination of what similar surrounding properties were sold for to calculate an estimate. This is an official Commonwealth bank estimate and one which they use to approve loans.

 

Oh and we also managed to save some money last month too 🙂

 

Networth

 

[wp_charts title=”linechart” type=”line” align=”alignleft” width = “100%” datasets=”-36000,-36000, -32000,-7000,20000,32000,45000,65000,83254,130000, 187910, 229010″ labels=”1-Jan-2011,1-Jul-2011,1-Jan-2012,1-Jul-2012,1-Jan-2013,1-Jul-2013,1-Jan-2014,1-Jul-2014,1-Jan-2015,1-Jul-2015,1-Jan-2016,1-Jul-2016″]

Date Rolling NetWorth $ Change Notes
 Jan-11  -$36,000  $0 HECS debt
 Jan-12  -$32,000  $4,000 Started Full-time work late Nov
 Jan-13  $20,000  $52,000 Built property and recieved FHOG ($21,000)
 Jan-14  $45,000  $25,000
 Jan-15  $83,254  $38,254 Bought second IP
 Feb-15  $110,215  $26,961
 $121,541  $11,326  IP’s re-valued
 Mar-15  $123,715  $2,174
 $122,128  -$1,587 Paid for holiday
 Apr-15  $125,906  $3,778 Withdrew equity from property
 May-15  $127,906  $2,001
 Jun-15  $131,904  $3,998
 $152,904  $21,000 IP’s re-valued
 Jul-15  $159,904  $7,000 Paid 4K off HECS Debt
 $161,904  $2,000
 Aug-15  $167,904  $6,000
 Sep-15  $170,110  $2,205  Car went out of Portfolio, Bought IP 3, Super went up and one IP went up
 Oct-15  $171,376  $1,265  Big bills. Not much saved.
 Nov-15  $173,263  $1,887 Super went down slightly
 Dec-15  $186,910  $13,648 IP went up in value
Jan-16  $187,910  $1,000  Some big bills
Feb-16  $189,910  $2,000  Bills (again)
Mar-16  $191,410  $1,500  Didn’t save very well
Apr-16  $193,410  $2,000  Steady month
May-16 $182,410  -$11,000  Two IP’s went down.
Jun-16  $211,010  $28,600  All 3 IP’s went up and super was updated
Jul-16  $229,010  $18,000 IP’s revalued with 2 out of three going up
Aug-16 $233,653 $4,643 Super went up along with cash
Sep-16 $237,390 $3,737 Super went up, HECC debt went down plus savings
Oct-16 $222,832.69 -$14,558 Joined finances with partner, bought ETF’s, IP’s went down

 

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Download my personal spreadsheet I use to calculate my net worth each month

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