May was not nearly as busy as April for Whitney and I. We mostly spent the month getting things unpacked and set up in the new house. This ended up being a little more expensive than I anticipated, but not too bad overall. Luckily we already had some of the furniture, had some given to us by family, and got some things used at lower prices.
As I mentioned I would do on my update last month, in May I wrote an article outlining the reasoning behind the decision to pay cash for the house. I’m still on the fence as to whether or not I’ll end up getting a HELOC in the future, but I have no need for it right now. Having no rent or house payment right now has been comforting with monthly income being so low now.
In addition to getting settled into our new home, Whitney turned 30 years old in May! We had as much fun as possible celebrating her birthday while maintaining some semblance of lockdown. Besides that, we spent much of May hanging out at our new home, working on the websites, and seeing family.
Income
Income from the websites (FifthWheelPT and Travel Therapy Mentor), was very low in May and will likely stay that way for the next several months at least due to COVID. In total, monthly earnings have dropped about 90% since January and February of this year. While this is definitely not ideal, now that I’m well past my FI goal net worth, it’s not the end of the world. I’m hopeful that things will recover sometime around August or September of this year though.
In May, Whitney and I also decided to cash in some of our credit card points as outlined in this article. In total we received a little over $1,200 cashing in Chase points. So this helped some on the income side of things.
Expenses
May expenses were much lower than in April with all of the house purchase costs. Even with the devastation in earnings from the business, I was still able to manage a 30% savings rate after factoring in the money from cashing in the credit card points.
Investments
The market had an insane recovery between April and May up over 17%! I’ve chosen to keep most of my money out of the market for now (only about 15% of net worth in equities currently) but I have to admit I’ve had some FOMO about not buying equities in March. I started building a speculative position in cryptocurrencies over the past couple of months. I used to be very against any sort of speculation like that but am willing to take a risk with about 5% of my total portfolio with the understanding that this could easily go to zero. So far the crypto investment is up about 20% in total.
Financial Independence Progress
My net worth increased by about 1.7% in May. This puts me at an all time high net worth again, just slightly surpassing where I was in January prior to the market drops. Exciting times!
Next Month
In June, we have very little planned besides enjoying our new home, working online, seeing few friends and family in the area, and continuing to try to recoup as much as possible from our cancelled 5 month trip to Central and South America. So far we’ve only gotten about 40% of the money back due to difficulty getting refunds from airlines, but hopefully we’ll be able to get some more in June.
We’re in the beginning stages of planning a road trip for about a month at the end of August and beginning of September to California and back, but are hesitant to start booking anything due to fear of running into a situation of having to cancel an entire trip again!
Until next month. Stay safe and healthy!
Fifth Wheel Physical Therapist 