It has been crazy around here with all the packing we are doing. Tomorrow we close on the house we bought and getting ready for the move has been fun. 2011 had numbers that were just plain ugly. It had moments that were bad for our finances but now I want to go over some of the really good numbers that the budget contains.
In 2011, we managed to save $14,572.80. This works out to 12.2% of all money coming into our lives. It does include both the amount saved for RRSPs and the extra we socked away for buying this house and just in case emergencies. I think this number is a lot higher than most Canadian’s savings.
I also know that if this was paid towards debt it would have put many people in a really good place. If you are trying to get out of debt could you imagine how far $14,000 would go? Personally in past years when we were trying to get out of debt, This was would have been a pretty typical amount we would have knocked out debt down by in a year. Now it is nice to see that we haven’t gone over board and are still saving something.
Our car insurance and content insurance on our apartment has dropped. Of course that happened with the changes that insurance was allowed to make so I probably have less coverage. But at least I’m not paying as much. We also saw a reduction in spending in our Phone/Internet/TV bills by $282.60. We cut our Christmas spending in half with a reduction of spending by $2,480.56. Last year it was sort of out of control.
While I highlighted in the ugly and the bad sections of this report on last year all the categories we has to work on due to overspending or irresponsible spending, It is nice to know where we managed to still keep costs under control.
The final good thing that I can report on is our liquid net worth. How this figure is made up is to take everything we have that has a simple dollar figure assigned to it and add it all up, and subtract all the liabilities. For example, bank accounts, investments, credit cards, mortgage are all things that have an easy to read dollar figure on them, they are included. Things like a house, furniture, clothing are all assets that are very difficult to pin down a value on so they are not included. That said our liquid net worth rose by 17.8% last year.
Our Net worth, which includes everything rose as well, climbing 11.5%. according to our balance sheet we are worth more today then we were at the start of 2011. I’d love to see that number even higher, but with the economy stagnant at the moment, one of the only ways I’m going to get it to climb is by spending less than we make. That is after all the only way to truly build wealth.
That concludes my report on how we did in 2011. What were some of your better moments in that year? How did you do financially? I will be back as soon as I finish up moving to this new house this weekend. At least it is a mild winter.
