Bringing back the monthly reviews on the blog! Read on to see how my February went.
Ah, February. The shortest month of the year, which means there’s less time to accomplish everything.
While I certainly did not accomplish everything I wanted to this month (I didn’t even really come close lol), it was still a pretty good month for my finances and I can’t complain that much.
My net worth is growing, my investments are growing, my dividends are growing (albeit slowly), and I’m starting to earn more interest on my savings.
In case you missed my February Net Worth post on Instagram, I won’t be doing monthly net worth posts on the blog anymore. Instead, I’m bringing back my monthly reviews where I can cover more and not have to go deep into detail with all my assets (because I’m lazy lol).
I hope you enjoy these monthly reviews, because they do take a while to write up. Feel free to DM me on Instagram if you have any suggestions on how to make these posts better. I’d love to hear from you!
Keep reading to see my net worth, spending, extra income, and investments in more detail.
Net Worth
(I honestly got lazy this month and didn’t document how much each of my assets were worth because I didn’t know I’d be writing this post. You can probably expect to see it in next month’s review.)
My net worth went up by over $1,000 from January, bringing me to $76,504.
Some notable events from February that contributed to this nice increase:
- I started funding my ~new~ brokerage account (there’s roughly $6,000 in there right now – more to come on the new account very soon!)
- I kept on contributing to my investment accounts, my HYSA, and my sinking funds.
Not an overly exciting month, but I stayed consistent and started my new account, so progress was definitely made!
Investments
Since I have a Reel coming at you this week instead of a static post, there’s no visual. But here’s everything I invested in February:
- Roth IRA – $542
- 401(k) – $184.62
- General Investing – $500
- New Brokerage – $3,946
- Total – $5,171
I honestly did not expect to invest over $5,000, but it happened!
This was mostly due to funding the new brokerage with money from savings (as well as the old General Investing 2 account – R.I.P!)
But other than that, everything else was consistent – the $184.62 comes right out of my paychecks and into my 401(k) (not including match), $500 gets automatically deposited into Gen Investing, and I invest $542 each month into my Roth IRA in order to max it out by the end of the year.
Spending
In February, I spent a total of $576 across all my categories.
My categories that I typically spend include subscriptions/bills, hobbies & recreation (aka pickleball), food/groceries, personal items, and auto/transport (gas).
This month I was actually pretty frugal without trying to be. My biggest expense was the pickleball league and open plays.
And to be fair, I live at home so most of my expenses are covered under the roof of mom and dad.
Frugal February, anyone?!
Overall, I am glad I kept the spending to a minimum, and I hope to do the same for March.
Extra Income
This month was pretty underwhelming, particularly because I didn’t make any money from reselling on Mercari.
However, I made the most I’ve ever made in interest from my HYSA and my vacation and school funds, coming in at $3.77.
Surprisingly, that exceeded my dividends, which came to $3.43 on the month for both my Roth IRA and General Investing accounts.
Disappointing, but I know these numbers will compound and become much larger one day in the future!