My Net Worth Update Mar 31, 2018

With this being my last full-time month of university I thought now would be an excellent time for me to start sharing updates on my net worth. It is also a pretty rough spot to start.

My - and my girlfriend's - current combined net worth is -$22,227. As bad as that sounds It's not as bad as it could be. For starters our net worth is $6,000 higher than it was last year even with me shelling out at least $12,000 for school and working part-time for a good part of the year (in addition to adding $12,000 more of student loans to my ever growing total).

March was a bad month for us. We invested/saved a total of $20, plus $30 my company automatically put in my pension, (we're purposely not investing a lot until we know how tight money will be after I graduate - it wouldn't be good to invest our money and then need to withdraw it in 6 months to meet our expenses, hopefully that won't happen). Once we get everything figured out this number will increase.

I had a very hopeful job interview earlier this month (as mentioned in my previous post). I currently don't know which job I will go with. I know I will get a better work-life balance at the new company but it definitely is not going to pay as well or provide as kick-ass of a pension. My decision is depending on a few unknowns that I need to find out before I can properly choose.

Our expenses were also quite high this month at $4,555. Part of this was because we bought a lot of stuff that we won't need to buy again for probably another 6 months (bulk cat food, bulk cat litter, bulk rice, jars for canning so we can make our own apple sauce, and a few others). We also spent about $500 on our major vacation of the year. There was also a ton of money on unnecessary expenses that will be cut out going forward as the joy they bring is so minimal compared to the cost.

It is also important to look at why our net worth is so low. Between the two of us we racked up about $60,000 of student loan debt ($54,000 of that is mine). The two biggest reasons why I have such high student loans are that when I started working in high school my divorced parents told me not to bother saving my money for university since they would pay for all of it as long as I kept my grades up (this was a lie they stopped paying after my first semester due to them arguing about how much each of them should pay). In high school I was really bad with my money - I had burned through my first four months of pay cheques in the first week I had a job (I got everything with IOUs from my parents) so naturally I was fine with not saving for my school costs. The second reason I have such high student loans is that I would always get as much as I qualified for even if I didn't need it (since these are Canadian government loans you don't pay interest or principle until 6 months after finishing full-time studies).

If I could go back in time I would have gotten a job as soon as I turned 14 and saved some of it for school as well as a portion for retirement and also I wouldn't have bought just the first car I could afford - which died very fast.

My goals for April:

1) Pass all of my classes

2) Figure out which job I am going to take and create a budget going forward

3) See our net worth grow to -$20,000