I love how this group goes silent during a big drop. No panic, no posts of frustration. Peaceful silence. Now that there is a little rally, people are calmly posting again. Looks like we're down a little over 200K now from the high. We'll see more dips, but the market is itching to recover. Probably new highs by years end.
Anyway. Nine more months till I grab my pack for some long distance hiking and retirement.
It's all good.
Just posted this over in my journal, but it's appropriate here, too.
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I missed doing our monthly "State of the Union" calculation at the end of last month. The horrors!
Stock/bond investments, plus cash holdings, are down YTD.
Personal home and rental homes are up YTD.
Net worth with those changes is within a few hundred dollars difference YTD.
One of our two farms is having the land leveled. (May already be done, it was getting close a week ago.) In theory that raises the value of the land because more of it can be farmed and in less time, so at a lower cost. Technically we'll still owe some of the cost of that, to be repaid over the next 7 years, with the expectation to pay it off with the increased yields.
Since I have no real idea of how much leveling increases the farmland value, I'm just considering it a wash for now. It's also possible that the leveling just now raised the value of the land up to the value I've considered it worth (if comparison farm values were for leveled land and ours weren't). Close enough for now.
I'm pleased to see our 4 separate income streams working as intended.
Our rental income went up this spring (and we raised it a lot less than comparable rents were going up. No need to be dicks.) Rental property values went up and will probably stay up.
Social security has done its job and medicare kicks in for me this November, so we should be saving $4k to $5k a year in health insurance costs next year.
Farm income was expected to drop to zero for two years due to the agreement we worked out with the new farmer. Looks like we'll make a tidy sum by not planting and by improving the land. Farmland socialism for the win!
Stocks are down for the year, as you know all too well. But the S&P 500 is now down less than 14% YTD, which is a lot nicer than 22% down. There are a lot of good indicators in the economy. We've got full employment and then some which is keeping demand high, which has good implications for the economy over the long term. We'll have to see what covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting interruptions to the world-wide economy will do.
Our cash holdings will drop about $12K over the next three months as we pay property taxes and the annual insurance for a couple of houses that come due at the same time. We have over $9k in the rental company checking account and expect (barring expensive repairs) to add $9k over the next three months. Most of that expense can be deferred until the first week of January so an awkwardly timed expensive repair is a nuisance, not a cash flow problem of any note.
In other words, in a world where gobs of people have seen their net worth tumble, ours is actually being pretty stable.
And that's the comforting thought it both should be and was expected to be. :)