April 2007 (MidMonth): Quest for $1,000,000.00 Dollars

Nearly three years into this, I’m starting to actually see the light at the end of the tunnel of debt I managed to find myself in. It’s funny, once you change your whole outlook on money and finances and the ball gets rolling — and you keep track of the progress — it starts to become, well, almost exciting and fun at the same time. Maybe it’s just me…

One million dollars is actually a very easy, not to mention realistic, amount to reach for nearly anyone. Income doesn’t really matter so much, and I’m aware that I won’t be able to retire early on it or anything, but for now, it’s a goal. A reachable goal. One I don’t think I’ll get bored with and abandon in a couple of years. When I hit it, I’ll raise the bar.

While I’m still tanking on the Assets side of things, over the past month I managed to put a pretty large ding in the debt I’ve been carrying. Being that this is the first mention of my finances, it’s basically been like this for the better part of three years — so when it’s coming down in $6k increments and there’s only around $21k total in non-Mortgage debt, well, it’s almost time to celebrate the first leg of the climb and prepare for the next climb to $1,000,000.

For explanation sake, since this is my first financial update, I don’t include the house as an Asset. Mostly because it’s too much of a pain to figure out what it’s actually worth on a month by month basis, and even if I were comparing it to local real estate sales, it’s really a hit or miss guesstimate. The actual mortgage, however, is something that’s easy to track, so I include it as a liability.

For the total Net Worth though, I omit the mortgage from the calculation, as technically the Asset of the house should theoretically cancel out the mortgage and then some. Make sense? I hope so.

Hopefully, a few more months from now I won’t be so cash poor.