I’ve decided to post quarterly retrospectives of my Net Worth changes over the past 90 days. This will be the first such quarterly report. Yippee! Let’s get going.
$1.03 Million Net Worth
No significant change to Net Worth in the last 90 days. This is sort of nice because the broader stock market has been on a losing streak lately. And despite that negative, my portfolio has managed to tread water and say consistent.
Q3 2023 Retrospective
Did I accomplish my themes for the last quarter? Well, I hadn’t published them yet so of course I achieved all my objectives for this quarter. Just kidding! No, I didn’t have any explicit objective in front of me for this quarter. My focus has been on getting my construction builder moving on the Cape Coral new construction build. That is finally broken ground and underway after a year and half ordeal getting to this point. That saga is better left for telling another day.
All in all, my market investments performed satisfactorily and what I expected being invested primarily in broad market mutual funds and real-estate. Zillow things the value of my home dropped a precipitous $60,000 over the last quarter and I disagree with that. Redfin’s $700K+ valuation is much more optimistic and realistic with what I know about this neighborhood.
Q4 2023 Look Ahead
The next 90 days through Christmas I plan to keep on rolling and holding the course. As construction in Cape Coral continues, I expect to have increasing pressure on my cash flow as I carry the loan interest payments on the larger construction loan balance. That will act as a headwind on my financial situation for the next 12-18 months. Until the construction is completed and I have tenants paying and moved in.
I plan to continue spinning the Options Wheel on my free cash from my index bonds that I liquidated a few months ago. Based on my performance on those, I’m treading water and making just enough income from spinning the wheel to pay off the interest charges on my HELOC that I used to kickstart the Cape Coral construction. That HELOC is nearly a 10% interest rate right now and a major drag on my finances, but I’m making enough money spinning the options wheels on half the total loan amount, so I figure that I am better-off keeping the funds spinning with Options spinning just enough to keep afloat there.
All in all, the past 90 quarters has been neutral and unremarkable. For both better and worse, I would call it smooth sailing. I hope the same for the next quarter to come. I’ll have some sticky tradeoff decisions that I need to make within the next 90 days. For example, I would like to maximize my Series I Bond purchases this year, but that will tie up another $10K in free cash that I don’t have right now–it’s tied up covering options contracts. I’m letting that situation play out for a couple more months before I decide. Most likely I’ll just bite the bullet and make the Series I Bond purchase in December before I lose that opportunity at the end of the year. That’s going to make me very strapped for cash, but I think it’s something I can absorb.
This month I’m also going on holiday with my partner to Hawaii for a couple weeks. That trip is going to cost us several thousand, but it’s a Holiday that I need, and one that I don’t mind spending money on to get away from the Fall and soon Winter weather.
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