Another month done and it's time to tally up the numbers.
However, before getting to the numbers, I feel the need to express a small, silly rant.
I have become rather anal in tracking my progress towards FIRE, OCD even. I know I am not alone here in this obsession. Whilst it is easy to track my bank accounts and stocks, as their value is quoted second by second, for my property investments I have to use a proxy. I can't list my houses every day to see what a buyer would pay. So in "the rules" of my tracking spreadsheet I use the property indexes issued by corelogic.com.au. It's not perfect, but they publish a daily index for each Australian major city, so it's easy for me to use. I know that I won't really know what the houses are worth till I sell, but I like tracking the approximate value by index (even if the starting value I used for this year was based on my personal, "expert", conservative assessment of valuation based on comparable sales and not the indexed value from purchase date, which seemed to overstate the value. Yes this rant contains a few contradictions. lol).
Anyways, I have been happily tracking the property value indexes month by month (and sadly even more often), and then all of a sudden at 31 August Corelogic.com.au decides to change their index methodology. The result of this is that my property value, per the index, dropped by $40,000 compared to 1 day earlier. Yes, it's only an approximate index, but I am miffed by this sudden drop in my NW.
Ok that's the end of my silly, and meaningless rant.
In the end, at 31 August my spreadsheet shows a small decrease in NW for the month of August, and FIRE is a little further away... hypothetically at least.
Savings were good for August, and stock market returns ok. Just that damned adjustment to the property index. Haha.
So we are parked at 22x spending for another month, but am looking forward to September as I think our spending will be lower than normal this month.