April was an AMAZING month full of financial wins! These wins include Debt paydown, Investment portfolio progress, and overall net-worth updates. I am super excited to share the progress of all of my hard work to get to a positive net-worth, and a healthy investment number. While my financial wins might not look as substantial as others, they are actually a huge deal to me. You have to keep in mind that this is only a race against ourselves. I am only comparing my April wins to my Networth updates from February. If I recall correctly, My networth was in the negative. Well that is definitely not the case anymore! Please stay tuned to see where I am at now.
But before you read on please Take a moment to subscribe to my email list! We are still in the building phase, so the MONTHLY newsletter will not be starting until we reach my secret milestone number. NO SPAM guaranteed, because I also cannot stand too many emails from random blogs.
There may be affiliate links within this blog post. When you choose to click on a link and make a purchase on these external websites, budgetbasedlife.com will make a small commission at no additional cost to you. Also, please know that the financial information provided on this post ( and throughout this website), does not represent financial advice. A lot of the financial information on this website is for educational purposes only, and reflect real life decisions. Read more about affiliate links in our full disclosure.
The first of April’s financial wins: SCHY IPO’d
The month of April took a surprising turn when I learned on a Reddit stock investment group that Charles Schwab was going to be releasing an international dividend ETF on April 29th. I was so excited about this fund that I stalked the market until the bell while on vacation in Miami, so that I could get in at the starting price. This is the first of my financial wins because people who are fond of Schwab funds have been waiting for an international version of the US dividend ETF that I know and love for a long time.
The US version of this ETF has been a huge money maker for me, so I hope that this one will be lucrative as well. I don’t usually take interest in IPO’s because they involve so much speculation, so taking part in the shared anticipation for this ETF was a nice change!
It is still too early for the ETF to have full information, because it just IPO’d around 2 weeks ago. However, I do not think that this ETF will be at a low price for long, so I feel really lucky to have a position in the early stages at all. We still don’t even know what the dividend will be, or when it will start providing disbursements. All in all, I am really looking forward to learning more about the plans with this fund, and watching it grow.
Financial Wins #2: Money added to the individual brokerage
My individual brokerage account has been pretty neglected since I used it to pay off one of my student loans in 2019. It has been a thing that has been on my mind constantly as I have built my Roth IRA and traditional IRA accounts. The balance has been sitting at around 2400 dollars for a few months, due to me taking the money out for vacations and last minute plane tickets. I know that may sound very irresponsible! Please hear me out: My roth IRA and 401K is aggressively funded every year. My individual brokerage has been used for very short term gains that beat the interest rate of my traditional bank. However, that all ends now.
I have been making an extreme effort to keep my individual brokerage account funded, and am finally seeing a little growth. This is one of my financial wins because its a struggle every month to leave that money alone! Do some of you have this issue? My next step with investing is going to be to focus more on some of my cryptocurrency investing. This will be purely speculative of course, and already accounts for less than 5 percent of my total assets. The software that I have been using for crypto trading allows me to place trades with help. I don’t trust myself to emotionally be able to place the trades on my own when the coins peak. So softwares like these have really helped me see the wins despite having somewhat of an emotional attachment.
The long awaited net-worth update
Now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for. The long awaited net-worth update, and one of my more exciting financial wins. Here is the thing: I got lucky a few times this month. The first stroke of luck was that my state passed a bill that equalized everyone’s pay rate. There are slight differences in salaries based on experience, but this apparently erased a lot of the gender wage gap at my office. It resulted in me getting a 3000 dollar raise! That means I have an extra 150 dollars (on top of my promotion raise of 755 dollars), to allocate towards investments.
There was a large net-worth jump from the stock market rally this month. Out of the whole month, I only had a down market day 4 times. My personal investment indexed even surpassed the wins of the US markets for the first time this year! While this may seem small to some, I will take whatever financial wins I can.
I was also able to pay off 1000 dollars of debt this month. My method is to pay a steady 1000 dollars per month towards debt until the end of 2022, when I will be finishing it off with a lump sum. This year, I have paid a total of 5000 dollars towards student loans.
Conclusion.
Touche. Sound arguments. Keep up the good effort.