We are coming into the final months of 2020, and it’s great to see some progress towards my FIRE goals and numbers. Still an incredibly long way to go, but as you can see from my net worth growth, it’s all a matter of principles, dedication, and time.

If you want to see my previous posts on Financial Independence Retire Early, check them out here: https://nathanchallengeslife.com/fire/

Net Worth

Throughout October, my net worth grew by $5,150 (7.2%) to $76,547. I’m happy with the growth over the month, and with only a few more months until the end of 2020, I’ll need a few good months to get close to, or reach my goal of $100,000. Check out the table below for the breakdown of my networth components:

While not the average increase of 15% for this month, I’m hoping it’ll be close to ~$10,000 increases per month for November and December 2020.

My networth is quite heavily determined by the market at the time. If everything is going well, I’ll have a good increase across pretty much everything, but it can go the same way backwards. While I can work on saving extra and building my house deposit, it really depends on what the market is doing at the time of recording my net worth.

I’ll see how the next few months go, but if I get a few good months in a row, I’ll be super close to reaching $100,000.

Self Wealth Investment Portfolio

As for my Self Wealth investment portfolio – taking the value right now at $57,697. I’ve been investing small amounts over October, working on diversifying my assets as well as investing some of my house deposit (very small amount). I’m planning to invest a small amount and take on a bit of risk to see how it goes over the next year or two when I’ll want to sell and use the money towards my house deposit. I’m only investing this money into ETFs, and therefore my risk will be quite low, but it’s impossible to know how it will be in a year’s time. Essentially, there should be an increase unless there is a major change in how things are going.

Still aiming to have it at $70,000 by the end of the year for my investment portfoio, but of course – while my house deposit goal has slowed that down, I’ll see how it goes closer to the year, and if I can prop it up a few $$$ to get there I probably will. This will make sure I’m on the right track for financial independence at 40.

Something that happened during October which was awesome, was that I’ve passed the 12 month period of investing through Self Wealth, and therefore I can now finally see when looking at selfwealth, there has been a really good growth since importing my portfio, as shown below:

So looking at my portfolio over a year, it’s shown 10% growth, not bad for essentially trying to match the market! While some of my investments are at ~100% growth, the majority of my portfolio (~80%) are from ETFs, which have all gone well.

Of course, anyone can have a good year or two investing, especially if you get lucky with even one of them. The real test is whether you can maintain the same growth of the total market, which means you need to keep an average return of at least 6-7%. Only time can really tell.

Savings Rate

For October, I managed to reach a 62% savings rate! There were some large expenses, such as the physiotherapist, but the big lead behind this result was being paid 3 times instead of twice due to some lucky timing of pay days and the month. Check out below for the breakdown:

As always, rent is at the top of my expenses for the month, but nothing I can do about that now, and happy to know that it won’t change over the upcoming year.

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That’s my October update!

How have your financial goals been going?

I’ve already started getting super excited about next year and what I want to achieve and do.

Until next month, challenge yourself to make better choices, challenge your thoughts and ideas, and challenge your own mind to realise what is possible.

Nathan