This is my monthly report of our personal net worth progress for March 2019.
I’m sharing this to show how important it is to track your net worth and seeing the progress. This is what I also expect and advise my clients.
From tracking your personal net worth and see how much you are worth, you can learn what works and what you should change in your finances.
It’s the first step to eliminate money as a source of stress and gain confidence in your future finances.
If you’d like to also see how much you are worth the way I do, I created a version of it, especially for my readers. You can get it here.
Also, if you’d like to read the previous report to get the flow of things you can check it here – February 2019 personal net worth report. This is the page with all previous reports is here.
Let’s jump in!
So, this month our net worth went up in 1.28% and our savings rate was 58.04% which is awesome.
Here is an interesting point I realized after making the savings rate calculation.
Since I started publishing our savings rate, this is the 2nd best savings rate we had. This comes in a month that we had the lowest income on that same period.
Staying in Sri Lanka really cuts our expenses down. March was the first typical month of expenses here without any exceptional one-time expenses. So, it represents well, what’s the real expenses level for us here.
The thing is that still about 40% our expenses this month are originated in Israel (Local taxes, car insurance, etc.). So, this savings rate could have been much higher theoretically.
Envestio:
So, seems like Envestio is back on track with releasing projects with a nice interest rates and more often than previous months. The problem is that projects are getting funded within 1-2 hours. So, if you are not on your email getting the notification about a new investment, you are likely to miss these opportunities.
I hope Envestio will introduce an auto invest system at some point to solve this. For now, they are still bringing a nice steady amount every month.
It was supposed to grow every month, even slightly tough. The reason it’s not growing is because the EUR/ILS exchange rate dropped, so even if I earn more euros in ILS amount it stays the same. But this is a risk I knew about when going into these investments. Perhaps it’s time to buy even more euros relatively cheap.
If you do decide to join Envestio through my link, I’ll get some bonus from them to invest more in my portfolio and you’ll get an extra 5 € bonus + 0.5% cash back for the next 270 days after you invest
Crowdestor:
This is my new investment. On the first month, I invested in two projects, while one of them already paid its interest on time which is great. The 2nd one supposes to pay the interest on the 10th and I don’t anticipate any problems there.
I was really looking forward to that first interest payment because I know that Crowdestor has more projects coming up as they announce that in advance, unlike Envestio.
So, when I got that interest payment, I was ready to re-invest that interest amount…And…I realized that Crowdestor’s minimum investment in a project is 100 (updated April 21st, 2019) 50 EUR (vs. 1 EUR on Envestio). This means that there will be more cash drag on Crowdestor platform. This will results in lower returns.
For me it means either one of these options:
Adding more money into Crowdestor, so the cash drag time will be shorter or just wait. That will be around 6 3 months, just to accumulate 100 50 EUR from interest. That’s long!
Anyway, Crowdestor is a good alternative to Envestio to diversify from. Also, projects are slower to be fully funded in Crowdestor.
UK property:
An interesting development in this front. After I invested in checking the property I’m about to buy, we realized that the asked price for the house is waaay too high for what it’s worth.
So, we decided to give a counter offer cutting the price to 60% of the initial ask price. Waiting for a response from the seller. Let’s see…
Let’s dive into the details of our net worth:
Table of Contents
OUR PERSONAL NET WORTH ANALYSIS:
Loans: So, I decided I’m going to give one more shot to cut our interest payments. Can’t say too much on this yet, but will update once I have some news. Stay tuned!
US & Israeli Stock portfolio: Slight decrease in value. Still, have lots of cash in the account. I hope to make more investments in the next few months.
US Real estate investment: Nothing new on this one. I’m waiting to get an update of either the sale of the rest of the properties or additional check of the rent collected. It’s usually happens around late summer time.
Bitcoin: Bitcoin’s value went a bit up this month. My Hashflare Mining is not profitable anymore by the way. I wonder if they will ever resume. They are selling now other crypto contracts on their website, but not Bitcoin.
So, overall a pretty boring investment month. Nothing exciting. This is how investments should be. They slowly grow, but it’s hard to see how they grow along the way…
I’m thinking long term.
PERSONAL LIFESTYLE AND PROFESSIONAL LIFE UPDATE:
Travel: Our workation in Sri Lanka is coming to an end soon. We will fly back to Israel in about 2 weeks.
Since the last report, we were in Kandy for 2 weeks which were great.
It’s a beautiful town in the hill country of Sri Lanka. It’s the 2nd largest city in Sri Lanka and much more appealing in my opinion than Colombo, the capital.
We built a nice routine there. Managed to find a wonderful hotel, met great people and also found a nanny for our daughter for 4-5 hours a day.
This enabled us to work in the morning time and then spend the time all of us together in the afternoon.
Afterwards, we had a short stop in Colombo and then went onto the west coast to Kalpitiya (spoiler: A whole story about my kitesurfing experience in Kalpitiya is coming up on the lifestyle section).
In the last few days, we went all the way up north to Jaffna. Jaffna is on the northern province of Sri Lanka. During the civil war, this part of Sri Lanka and the eastern part (which we just arrived to today) were partially controlled by the LTTE which is a terrorist group fighting the Sri Lankan government for 30 years.
I mentioned before that I read a book called: Sri Lanka the new country by Sundarji, Padma Rao about the war. So, I was very interested to travel to the northern province.
In Jaffna itself, the Jaffna fort is where you can see some of the buildings that were hit in the war. There are more places like Mullaitivu, that we thought of going. Mullaitivu was the last place where the LTTE controlled and where was the last battle against them leading to the victory of the Sri Lankan army.
We realized though that Mullaitivu was less of interest to us and preferred to spend our last few weeks in Sri Lanka in other places.
A bit more about Jaffna area. about 2 hours from Jaffna resides Delft island. It’s an Island off the coast of Sri Lanka where major tourism has not been reached yet. So, it’s still pretty isolated. We got a nice good local island vibe there.
Interview: I was interviewed to The Becoming Superhuman Podcast by Jonathan Levi. It was a cool interview. We spoke about our lifestyle and about money.
Jonathan Levi, is a top instructor on Udemy. He has over 175K students and holds more than 10 successful courses. I took his speed reading course which is very intensive. I didn’t complete it because of that, but it’s a high-quality course.
Related: Check out all Jonathan Levi’s courses on Udemy and specifically the course about speed reading I took.
Become a SuperLearner 2: Learn Speed Reading & Boost Memory
We spoke about how to align your life and lifestyle goals with your finances. It supposes to be published at the end of April, so stay tuned.
Additional interview I did was with Marc Guberti on his Breakthrough Success Podcast where listeners learn how to achieve their breakthroughs.
We spoke about our workations and aligning finances and lifestyle. I’ll add it on the next report once it’s up in a few weeks.
I was very excited to be a guest on this podcast. Some major guests were already hosted there, like Seth Godin, Neil Patel, Perry Marshall, and James Clear.
Marc, by the way, is only 15. He is a wizz!
Related: Interested to align your life and lifestyle goals with your financial goals? Interested in eliminating money as a source of stress and gaining confidence in your future finances?
I invite you for a free financial fitness call with me. Just click the link and book a time on my calendar
Reading: I recently finished the book called: The History of Ceylon. It was a slow read, as I mostly read it only on the weekends.
I’ve learned a lot from it. If you plan to visit Sri Lanka this is a must to understand the culture of people here. Think about all your local myths and cultural stories. This is the one for Sri Lanka.
I also finished reading How to Raise a Wild Child: The Art and Science of Falling in Love with Nature by Scott D. Sampson.
It’s an important topic which I fully supportive of but must say I’m not blown away by the book.
The most important thing is, go outside by yourself and with your kids as much as possible and make sure they get enough outdoor experiences that they can immerse themselves in. I’m definitely going to adapt some ideas from this book.
So, I’m still at a good reading rate for my reading challenge.
I invite you to follow my Goodreads profile and read along with me. I’d love to share ideas.
I invite you to follow my Goodreads profile and read along with me. I’d love to share ideas.
Lifestyle:
So, my Sinhala level, unfortunately, stayed pretty basic.
I’m still asking people: “how to say…” and try to read a bit. Did I achieve my goal? I think it’s 30% of it. not much.
I also mentioned that I’m really looking forward for my kitesurfing course in Kalpitiya.
What happened though is that we were finally ready to go there and then I was told by several instructors that the season was just finished. There is not enough wind now.
I was so disappointed to hear this! Here I am, already two months in Sri Lanka, how could I miss that important detail?!
So, we decided to take the chance and go to Kalpitiya anyway. I got in touch with Sun Wind Beach. Susantha, the owner, was very kind and even told me that I can come and will only be charged on the classes I’ll take, according to the wind situation.
I managed to have two days of wind, with about 2-2.5 hours each day with an instructor. I got to the point where I can control the kite and do body dragging.
On the day that I was finally suppose to start practicing with a board, there was not enough wind. We went with the whole equipment and a boat, but that was for nothing.
So, achievement score on Kitesurfing: 50%, that’s half of the course.
And important note to self: Next time make sure when is the season and don’t just assume it’s all year around.
So, I’ll have to complete my kitesurfing experience, someplace else around the world or again in Sri Lanka.
By the way, the season begins again mid-may. So basically it’s only a month and a half with the unstable wind period.
If you plan to come to Sri Lanka for kitesurfing, just check the weather yourself, better than trusting on what I say about kitesurfing seasons.
Exercise:
I’m still exercising every morning. I’m already at 12 push-ups a day (increasing by a single one every week). For some reason it became harder to do and not easier. I’m not sure why.
Regarding the stretches, I probably also need to improve that. I don’t feel any difference in my flexibility (Perhaps too soon?). I think I’m actually not doing some of the stretching right. I started to look into other flexibility exercises but haven’t really changed anything.
I’m also asking myself if doing these kind of stretches right when you wake up is effective for my goal (touching my toes), as my body feels very stiff right when I wake up. So, perhaps I’m just working for nothing.
Any expert trainer around for advise?
FIWE 2019:
2 weeks after I’m coming back from Sri Lanka, I’m flying to Budapest for FIWE 2019. I’m really looking forward to that. I’m also going to give a lecture with other guys about creating a FIRE mastermind. It’s going to be a fun week!
NOW OVER TO YOU
Do you track your personal net worth? What insights did you get this month? Add it in the comments.
Comments
Share interesting ideas through reading the same book is quite interesting. People can bring their own perspective from where they are from. 🙂 T