Made some great progress with my net worth and other financial goals over July. If you want to see my previous posts on Financial Independence Retire Early, check it out here: https://nathanchallengeslife.com/fire/

During July, I saw increases in all my money accounts – which is always great to see. That meant that my net worth increased a whopping 18.7% in one month.

As you can see, everything increased, which helped to push up my networth for the month. Considering I’ve got a new goal of saving towards a house, my cash account will be increasing faster than anything else, as all of my saved money (52% of income for July) will be going straight into that account.

When looking at my graph for the growth of my net worth, it has really helped it push it into a really nice upwards trending line:

I’m so excited to see how this grows in the future. While I can’t expect every month to grow my 18%, my main goal will be trying to increase this every month and year, and after 15 years, hopefully I’m in a pretty good position.

I’m getting pretty close to my goal of $100,000 by the end of the year, can’t really tell how it’s going to turn out, but I’m always looking on the upside 😀

Investment Portfolios

As for my Australian investment portfolio, I’m currently at a total return of 14.9%.

I logged into ShareSight and input my data from my current positions and previous sold positions. I love doing this every year to really see how my portfolio is going compared to the market.

When looking at my graph of performance since inception, it is really satisfying to see that my portfolio has grown at 11.87% per year since November 2016, compared to the Australian S&P 200 index of 8.16%. Considering I’m really only aiming for at least 6-8% per year, this has been amazing to see, and it only makes it better for the future. I’m expecting some pretty rough years, as can be expected with investing, but over the long run, absolutely nothing to worry about.

I’m happy with how it’s gone. When I started, it’s not that I didn’t know what to do, it’s more so because I was caught up in buying a few random company shares that I thought would do well. While some have, there are some that haven’t (hence the poor performance at the start). It’s been a useful learning experience, and I’ve had my fun, but I’m back where I started and should have stayed, with the majority of my holdings being low cost, diversified ETFs. I have a few single companies on the side that I’ve invested in after a lot of research, such as Appen.

Looking at my international investments through STAKE, there quite a different story there. While it looks impressive, most of this performance increase is due to luck – one of my investments, Stamps.com, is currently up 691%… lol. The total portfolio is now up to 220% (in just over a month after the photo below..). While some purchases in that portfolio were chosen deliberately, such as Facebook and Alibaba (both have done pretty well), Stamps.com was purely a pretty random buy. Not complaining though!!!

When looking at selfwealth, a more accurate representation of my australian portfolio performance over the past 8-9 months, which only started tracking since later 2019 after importing all my holdings, my portfolio is performing well. So at this stage, what I’m currently doing is definitely working out well for me.

Savings Rate

For July, I managed to get a 52% savings rate. And noting above, that is all going into the new house deposit fund, currently at ~$3,200.

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That’s my August update. Incredible pleased with how I’m going in terms of net worth, and my investments all buildling towards FIRE.

If you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer any of them!

Until next month,

Nathan