Finance Travels

In April 2012, our stock performance trailed our benchmark by 1.61%.  This was the poorest result in the benchmark comparison since October of 2011, where we trailed by 2.91%.

Ooops…..

Due to an error that I had made in mid-April in which I recorded a stock purchase twice, I mistakenly overstated our net worth report for the month.  Our new (correct) report shows a gain of only .14% over the month.

April 2012 gave us a modest gain of $2,574.  The only major financial event this month was a $550 payment for local taxes.  The market was mostly lackluster, and we did end up down in comparison with our VTI benchmark this month.  This month also marks the first time that my 401(k) plan exceeded the $100,000 mark.

Our portfolio was up a total of 4.45% over March.  In comparison with our benchmark, VTI, which was up by 2.62%, we beat the benchmark by 1.83%.  For the first quarter of 2012, we beat our benchmark in 2 of the 3 months.

March ended up being a pretty good way to end the first quarter of 2012.  We completed our fourth straight month of positive net worth growth with a $7,770 increase.  Over the quarter, we increased our net worth by over $35,000.  Our investments have been doing very well and accounted for over half of the gain.  I’m cautiously optimistic that the economic growth that seems to have come around slowly will continue.  The one area where I wish we could have done better this month is in paying down our home loan.  I’m really hoping to get that balance down to less than $140,000 before June.

February 2012 was a great month for our stocks.  We basically doubled-up our benchmark and beat them by 4.41%.  I didn’t keep as close track as I probably should have, but I believe a lot of the increase was due to Apple’s stellar month.

Buoyed by our 2011 income tax refund and positive growth in the stock market, we were able to make a huge gain in February.  In fact, the $17,665 that we gained over the month was just $60 shy of our record gain recorded in October of last year!

Probably the most remarkable part of February was that we managed to pay down our mortgage by $4,430.  We used our tax refund to pay $2,800 of that total.

Clearly, this month went quite well, although I don’t expect the stock market gains that we’ve seen in the first 2 months of the year to continue.  I suspect that March will be a much more typical month for us.

We trailed our index, VTI by .88 points in January.  Our next stock purchase will likely be in March and I’m kind of hoping for a slight downward adjustment in the markets before that happens.

The first month of 2012 was definitely a success.  With the stock market up a good bit, we managed to pump out nearly $12,000 in net worth increase.  We also payed down about $1,300 on our mortgage, which means that the balance is now down lower than what it had been before our refinance a few months ago

I’m hoping to cross the $300K line in February, as we expect to receive our IRS return.  The majority of this money will be spent to again pay down the home mortgage – I’m laser-focused on getting that mortgage note payoff date down to 2036 so that we can get back to the timeframe of our original 30-year mortgage.

We beat our benchmark of VTI in December 2011 by .36%.  Our portfolio increased in value by 1.74% while VTI increased 1.38%.

Our stock performance for 2011 is summarized in the below table:

So, we only beat our comparison index in one-half of the months.  However, if you sum up the totals, we managed to stay ahead over the entire year by .67%.  October was our best stock performance month, with a gain of over 8%.   Likewise, September was the worst month with a 6.26% decline in investment value.  We did improve significantly from when I started keeping track of these values in 2010.  In that year, we trailed the VTI index by .12%, so 2011′s performance did beat that by nearly three-fourths of a percent.