Welcome to the April 2025 edition of our net worth tracker, where we’ll track our net worth month over month. I first started tracking our net worth when this blog was started at the beginning of September 2019. I started by creating the Net Worth Baseline report.
You can view Previous Net Worth reports HERE.
April flew by, and we’re a third of the way through the year. April felt more like spring. Flowers are blooming, warm rain is falling, and the grass is starting to grow!
Financially, April was another poor month, but it recovered quite a bit towards the end. The markets continued to fall from the dip that started in January, accelerated by “Liberation Day”. That’s the day all the tariffs were announced.
The markets hit correction territory last month and fell towards recession territory, but started recovering the last week or so of April.
Monthly Roundup
Previously, I would go through my month and go over the highlights. These days, I’m doing it a little differently. Unless you convince me that you want to hear about my month, I’m not going to talk about it.
April 2025 Net Worth
Here’s how April compares to last month:
April Account Breakdown
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in April.
Cash ($2,760.19)
Monthly Blurb: This is where our paychecks get deposited. All our income goes into this account and then gets transferred to the proper accounts as set by my budget. As usual, I do the net worth report before transferring money to the appropriate accounts.
It was a below-average month for us both in terms of income. No “extra” paychecks, and we worked fewer hours this month. Fortunately, our spending did not include medical bills this month. That helped, but we still had car insurance to pay this month. Other than that, we were able to make some positive movement this month, in terms of savings.
Our spending was average this month.
Investment Cash ($3,962.69)
Monthly Blurb: All of our cash left over at the end of the month is transferred here and is considered part of our savings rate.
This is where our leftover income went for both February and March, after the medical bills were all paid for. A portion of the investment cash is now invested in an S&P 500 index fund, which took a little bit of a hit this month.
February 2024, we bought our first investment property. We put it back on the market this February. It’s going to get sold this year, even if I have to take a loss. Hopefully, it’s not much, if any. So far, we have had no offers.
Remaining Cash Accounts (Emergency and Sinking Funds) (-$13,091.04)
Nothing exciting here. Just the usual. We are back to saving up for our property tax bill for when it’s due early next year.
I suppose this is the exciting news for the month. We bought a new (to us) car that is replacing one of our other vehicles. The old car was over 200k miles and starting to have transmission issues. The new car is slightly under 100k.
Right now, as I’ve said before, we are putting $200 a month into our travel fund. There is no end date set, and we are planning more vacations, so this will probably go up.
We also decided to put $200 a month into car savings, instead of saving it up all at once. That way, we have the savings ready when we need it, and it doesn’t completely blow up our savings rate for the whole year! Check out 2024 if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
Retirement Accounts
401(k)s ($8,026.53)
February ended on a negative note. March was substantially worse than February. The markets continued their dive in April after “Liberation Day”. Fortunately, those losses were all recovered by the end of the month.
IRA ($408.00)
All market performance here.
Overall, that’s a gain of 1.09% between the 401k and IRAs.
College Fund ($52.53)
The college fund is invested in mutual funds, just like the IRAs. It was up 0.06 percent. Laughable, but a whole lot better than the last couple months.
Net Worth (-$6,176.23)
April was so close to being a positive month for us, but instead, we posted our third negative month in a row. We would have been positive if we had not bought the car.
Our expenses were less than last month because we had no medical bills to pay. The big expense this month was paying for car insurance.
In total, our net worth fell slightly. We had a decrease of approximately 0.49%.
The year started out on the right foot, but that didn’t last long. We’ll see how the market performs the rest of the year. There was a lot of uncertainty last year, and that sentiment has only intensified so far in 2025. Last year, the markets were up over 20%.
The tariffs rolled out in early April. The markets initially took a sharp dive. As I suspected, the market rebounded once we became more comfortable with the tariffs.
We’ll see how the market performs the rest of this year, but having a positive first half of the year would be nice. I need to be able to sell this house now, while it’s prime home-buying season.
Accessible Net Worth (-$14,610.76)
Monthly Blurb: This is the money we are able to put away, not including the tax-advantaged retirement accounts.
Our income was below average, and our expenses were about average this month, so why the big loss? This reflects the car purchase we made, and the money that came out of one of the sinking funds.
Liabilities
Status: None, as usual. They’re a burden, so I avoid them. The cars, the house, they’re all paid for. Student loans…never used them. Credit Card debt? I only use one, and it gets paid off every month, and often, I’ll pay it off multiple times per month. Just depends on how many times I think about it.
Passive Income
January and February are very boring months for dividends. March, as expected, saw a bump in dividends.
We set a record for March dividend income! It’s only a few dollars more than last year, but it’s more! So I’m happy.
April was the worst month of the year in terms of dividends.
The interest rate in my savings account dropped to 3.60% from 3.70%. We started 2024 close to the high at 4.35%. The market is becoming increasingly volatile, and what will happen in the remainder of 2025 is up in the air.
Saving’s Rate
I track my savings rate in order to help keep my feet to the fire so that later I can be Gone on FIRE. As a bonus, you get a glimpse into my cash flow by looking at the income and expense rows.
I had to adjust the savings goal to 50% a couple of years ago. In 2022, we barely missed that goal, but we met it in 2023!
As a result of meeting the goal in 2023, I raised the bar to 55%.
In 2024, we missed the 55% goal by about .5%, if you include our car savings in our total savings number. Otherwise, we were around 35% in 2024.
I’m keeping the goal at 55% for 2025. In January, we exceeded that goal thanks to our “extra” paychecks.
We had no savings for February — 0%! We put all our leftover money towards medical bills, which were paid in March. This dropped our Year-to-date average to 47%.
April was very close to our YTD average, so there was little change. We’re still at 47%.
I’m confident we can recover as long as we don’t continue to have unexpected expenses.
Also, starting in February, we started beefing up our travel fund for some vacations we would like to go on. I may adjust this number, but we are going to start by setting $200 aside each month for the rest of the year.
I’m trying to keep the travel savings low so that we can still achieve our 55% savings rate goal. That said, we’re about to buy a cruise, which cost more than we have saved so far.
This month, we saved 45%, which kept our YTD Savings Rate at 47.1%, down .5% from last month.
Of that 45% we are spending, we give 10%, and property tax is another 10%, so that means we are living on 25% or less for everything else.
Housing and daycare alone used to eat up over 30%. Fortunately, property taxes have gone down, and there’s no more daycare! (Mostly)
For now, we only have daycare bills during school breaks until the kids are old enough to be left alone. Summer break is coming up, so we will have daycare bills for the summer.
Hopefully, we can get our savings rate above 55% with daycare gone, although other kids’ activities have started. We’ve been doing gymnastics and now have ballet for one of the kids.
Those are relatively cheap compared to paying for daycare.
Here’s how we did this month.
We were at 47.14% in April YTD.
Income ($9,757.66)
Right now, our only source of active income is through our full-time jobs.
This is what a below-average income month looks like for us.
Expenses ($5,342.40)
Our expenses were about average this month.
Here is a quick breakdown:
1) Home Escrow ($700.00)
The normal amount we put aside every month to pay for property taxes and insurance
2) Giving ($786.97)
The usual 10% we give every month.
3) Cost of living ($3,855.43)
This includes all our bills (Gas, Electric, Water, Internet, Phone), transportation, food, shopping, and car insurance. Home insurance is paid for out of our Home Escrow savings account.
Like last year and years before that, we are going to drain our dependent care account at the end of the year in one lump sum. Doing it that way is less paperwork for us.
April 2025 Vs. March 2025 Expenses
Where do I begin comparing the two months?
I didn’t have to take a trip to the ER in March, so that’s good. The bad part is that I had to pay for February’s visit to the ER. The good part about that is we saved most of that money in February.
April and March were pretty different in terms of where our money went. Medical Bills vs. Buying a car. Also, the markets were did better in April, once they started to recover from the initial dip.
Hopefully, May will stay smooth, and we won’t encounter any problems. We do have some expenses coming up for our cars, for travel, and for some dental work.
Goals Progress
Financial Goals
The Roth IRA contribution is done, and the money has been transferred to the proper accounts.
Aside from the 401k, which is on automatic contributions from my paycheck, it’s still close enough to the beginning of the year, so I’m not completely sure how the other goals are going to turn out.
I’m unsure about the Real Estate (RE) Investing goal since the property is on the market. I’ll include the net profits here since that will become future investment money.
However, if we take a loss on the property, that will subtract from any money we save up.
The passive income goal is a stretch after hitting records last year. Hopefully, we’ll break the record this year.
The savings rate goal took a big hit in February. We recovered about 8% in March and shaved a hair in April. Hopefully, we can recover the rest of the way before the end of the year, although summer will be rough.
Blog Goal!
I didn’t get around to posting anything in April, but I posted one article in January and have more planned. I need to find time to write them. Take a look and let me know what you think of the latest posts.
I did create some compound interest calculators in March. The calculators can be found here: Calculators
Personal Goals
I’m doing a reading goal again this year with two books. Last year, I read 2, and that seems like a good amount for me. That seems to be my sweet spot.
I’ve finished my first book (Developing The Leader Within You). I mentioned last month that I also finished my second book From Paycheck to Purpose by Ken Coleman. It had a few insights, but I didn’t really find it that helpful.
Now I’m trying to decide if I should start a third book. There are a few I want to read: Build The Life You Want by Arthur Brooks, Cues by Vanessa Van Edwards, and Millionaire Mission by Brian Preston.
And then there is my physical health. I didn’t get to where I wanted in 2021, 2022, 2023, …or 2024.
I was actually doing fine in 2024, and then I went crazy eating whatever I wanted from Thanksgiving to the end of the year. I at least proved to myself that I can lose fat.
I want to lose fat, and part of that is going to be by eating healthier. I have been on target so far this year. I’ve been tracking my eating and exercising regularly, and I’m down about 20 pounds so far.
My goal to start was 20 pounds, but I may need to up that to 30 and then regain some weight as I add muscle mass. I’m still fatter than I would like to be.
April 2025 Roundup
The month of April was overall good. Nothing too unexpected happened. We remained relatively healthy and didn’t miss any school or work days.
The weather was great for most of April. We had a few rainy days, but most days were warm and dry, and we got to play/work outside a bunch.
I continue to be excited as we progress through the year. As always, there’s really a lot to be thankful for.
Stay tuned for next month’s New Worth update!
FIRE Away!
REMINDERS:
- 2 big items not included in my net worth:
- House & Cars – Their value will be added to my net worth if and when I sell them.
- 2 accounts not included in the net worth total (even though they’re listed):
- 529 – This is my money for my babies. Consider it their net worth summary.
- Home Escrow – This is Uncle Sam’s money. We don’t mess around with Uncle Sam and his money.
- Total income only includes our active income, which is currently our full-time jobs.