Sometimes I have a clear idea of what I’m going to write and sometimes I just have to put up words and see where it goes. This is one of those later times.
It’s been raining for the last 24-36 here. It feels like we didn’t have a day on Monday. I’m still stuck on the Tom Brady return to New England. Every article in the news seems to be about the upcoming debt ceiling disaster. I updated our net worth last night and for the first time in forever, it went down. It feels like there are a billion reasons to be depressed right now…
… or not. Most of these things are temporary. The weather will change soon. Mac Jones outplayed Tom Brady. The debt ceiling will be figured out one way or the other within a couple of weeks.
Lastly, our net worth will likely rebound. It’s still 50% more than what I expected it would be several years ago. It’s hard to get stressed it going back one percent. Initially, I was a little stressed. The markets have been consistently going up for years now, so they have me trained to expect that to continue.
In other personal finance journey news, I finished doing our 2020 taxes. I’m terrible at getting taxes done. I hate it and wait until the last minute. This year I wanted to get them done earlier because it would help with stimulus money. However, it didn’t happen with all the dog-sitting business we’ve. It turns out that we have a big refund, the biggest we’ve ever had. Some people may say that we shouldn’t have given a big loan to the government for a long time, but our taxes tend to have a lot of moving pieces with my income varying throughout all my side hustles.
My wife continues to sell things through Ebay and Facebook Marketplace. We have had a lot of odds and ends over the years. Kids’ old clothes are a big seller too. It’s working to clean up the basement. We had a contractor by to price what it would cost to finish the basement. They are still writing up the estimate, but I suspect that the tax refund will just funnel to them. That would be a big win for us.
I looked at our cryptocurrency for the first time in a while. I’m up about 40% thanks to dollar-cost averaging. I haven’t put any new money into it for a little while as it feels like buying in at highs. If you don’t have any crypto it may not be a bad idea to put a small amount in, if you can afford it. My crypto holdings are about 0.00000001% of our net worth (I’m exaggerating a bit), so it’s no big deal if it crashes or even doubles overnight.
That’s the quick update for the day. I’ll have more on Thursday with an update for September.
Some things are off kilter, but overall it looks like things are on the up and up. ?
i have created 3 comments and cancelled them. just want you to know that one of your devoted readers is puzzled by part of this article.
Thanks for the comment about the comments. I reached out to you separately via email with a longer explanation than I have here.
I puzzled myself while writing the article. As I said on the outset, it was an attempt at something new, writing without much of a plan. I had hoped to make it clear that I was also writing while feeling down, but fighting it.
I don’t know which part of the article you found puzzling, largely because it was a bit of a dumpster fire of an update. I could see many people finding many parts puzzling :-).
I just finished taxes at the end of September. It gets more complicated every year. The small business part was very confusing due to the 2019 tax changes. I didn’t send in any estimated taxes in 2020 because the government didn’t send us any stimulus. It worked out pretty well. We got a little refund after it was all said and done. I’m happy with that.