Another month in the bag.

music selection:  “Love’s Been A Little Bit Hard On Me” — Juice Newton

Each month, I review my financial results for the period and year to date.  This includes a summary of my spending, budget, and some ratios to benchmark portfolio performance.  I hope it serves as inspiration to those who are afraid they will never accumulate more than a few hundred thousand and thus will never retire.  It doesn’t take as much money to retire as the mainstream FIRE community insists!

ASSETS:

Wells Fargo (taxable): This finished the month up 722 dollars at 29,606.  That is a 2.50% monthly gain and good for 12.24% annual gain.

Interactive Brokers (taxable): Here I finished the month at 227,772 down from 229,662 last month.  That is a monthly loss of 0.82% and year to date gain of 43.05%.

Interactive Brokers (tIRA): This account is up 4,079 to 175,807 versus last month.  The monthly gain is 2.38%.  Feel pretty good about the long term performance of this mostly property and casualty insurance portfolio that has a year to date gain of 19.82%.  A sleepy industry should normally return 9-12% a year not twice that in half the time.

HSA: This account is up 136 on the period to 7,476.  That is a 1.86% move in the right direction or 191.30% year to date, driven largely by my annual contribution.  This account is still “small” and will see wild swings until it has more ballast.

Checking: Cash is down to 19,301 from 20,964.  That is a 7.93% decrease from last month and 124.74% gain year to date.  I will make quarterly estimated payments of 2,350 to the Revenue Service throughout the year.

Total investable assets come to 459,962 up 0.30% from 458,578 last month and up 33.91% from 343,483 year to date.

Don’t forget to see the long term trend at Lizard King’s Transparency Page.

LIABILITIES:

Home: paid

Car: paid

Income tax: I have a 4,700 income tax prepayment asset and expect to make two more such payments during the year.  I hope to get my estimate “about right” this year.  I have been carrying too much prepayment so far in early retirement.

WITHDRAWAL RATE:

I have automatic withdrawals from my taxable investing accounts set to provide a cash income of 25,000 a year.  Against a liquid net worth of 459,962 that is a withdrawal rate of 5.44%.  I earned 2,053 in options premium income during the month of July.  I’m trending to earn 77% of budget from options trades this year.  Additionally, my income centric approach to investing includes 24,715 in expected distributions, dividends, and interest for the year or an additional 98.86% of budget.  Total budget is estimated to be covered 175.76%.  In the event of a downtown, I should be immune to the need to “sell at the bottom”.  At the same time, I can expect steady and robust growth to keep ahead of inflation.

SPENDING:

Spending was 1,724 for the month, which is under the 2,000 target.   I will be spending much less on Stansberry products now that I have a Choice account allowing access to 10 services with my PWA subscription combined.  This should allow me to come in under budget for the year and for the foreseeable future.  There will be two more cash transfers to the IRS this year.

OTHER INCOME:

I picked up 131 dollars from my efforts on the local Water Board.