Net Worth Update: May, 2020

This is late, but our liquid net worth increased in May by 10.46% in USD and 8.95% in EUR to $62,959 and €57,340 respectively.

Honestly, that feels like an absurd number to report considering the economic upheaval happening around the world, but whatever the stock market is doing, it helped us in May. Of course, we're not especially wealthy, so a 10% increase meant around a $6000 change. But whatever the case, I'm happy for the positive month. I hope the asset price optimism is worth it, and that the stock market's implied future situation for the worldwide economy is correct.

Additionally, I got the last of the assistance payments for my dental work. In all, the dental work was a big cash suck (over several years), but the various bits of help from my insurances lightened the blow a bit.

Why Late?

There are two reasons this took me longer to publish than normal.

The first is that I didn't succeed in coming up with the non-liquid NW number. It turned out to be more complicated than I expected. For example, we'd need to estimate the value of both my and my wife's Social Security value as well as our Deutsche Rentenversicherung value. It's certainly doable, but it's tricky.

The second reason is that with the protests happening in the US and abroad following the murder of George Floyd, it felt tactless to write about how I made money in May. Maybe it's no better this week to do it, but that first week of June felt like attention should be focused on the protests and the issues surrounding them.

Despite the fact that I'm trying to improve our economic situation by saving as much income as is feasible, I recognize that the system has major flaws that leave a lot of people out. I think those of us trying to take advantage of the capitalist system as it stands should look at those failures and be honest about them. I don't have any answers to offer about those failures, but the first step is acknowledging them.

June Forecast

As has been the case since the start of the pandemic, my wife's income has been hit hard. I'm incredibly lucky that my job has survived thus far, and my pay hasn't been too adversely affected, but our household income is down a lot.

We got our US stimulus check in May, and after several weeks of trying to figure out how to deposit it, we finally succeeded. So that will be part of the June change.

And of course, the stock market is going to do whatever it does. This last week was crazy volatile, and I expect that we'll see lots more of that.