Tuesday, 25 September 2018

Financial update Q3 2018

With the blog launched and Q3 ending, it is time for the very first update on our personal financial status!

Savings rate

How we calculate our savings rate is explained in this earlier post. Our monthly savings rate has been steady at 35% in 2018. Great to see we invest 1 out of every 3 euros in our future rather than stuff we don’t need. Considering the non-regular money coming in, we used the holiday money for holidays and the tax return is still parked in a saving account. We probably will “invest” the tax return in a mortgage hack that I will blog about in the near future (UPDATE: see here). If we do so the yearly saving rate will drop below 35% but will certainly stay above 30%.

The mortgage
As reported here we have been investing in paying off the mortgage with most of our money until the beginning of 2018. We have paid off approximately 30% of the initial mortgage by now. See a great post here doing the math of mortgage down payments vs. index fund investing. We have reached the tipping point. Our mortgage payments are comfortably low and include annuity payments anyway. The mortgage will take care of itself in the coming 26 years. The money locked up in the house is not included in the journey to FI number, it just helps to keep the FI number low as a future paid-off house will mean we need less money for a comfortable life.



FI percentage
Dedicated investing in the low-cost exchange traded fund VWRL will be the way to go from here! Our FI number consists of our emergency cash fund, VWRL and my defined contribution (DC) pension. Have a look here why I feel I can include my DC pension in the FI number. That being said, our current FI percentage hovers just above 16%. With the bull market raging for a decade now some head wind would not be unlikely in the years to come which would only make the journey more interesting to follow. 

It's all relative 
The inset of the figure above presents the relative amounts of our net wealth in real estate (house WOZ value – mortgage), our cash emergency fund and ETFs. We are aiming to get the ETF percentage up but the booming housing market is not helping 😉

No comments:

Post a Comment