Mid-year review: 53k net worth growth in 6 months

What a roller coaster this year has been! In the midst of corona panic, overall uncertainty in the world and stock markets plummeting, our financial year so far has looked like this:

• Our net worth grew by €53k, from €93,000 to €146,000
• Our investment portfolio went from €33,600 to €55,400
• We saved up €19,000 in cash and need to figure out how to invest it
• We received €1277 worth of passive income so far this year from crowd funding and dividends

We achieved all this by:

Not panicking when our investments took a hit from corona

We didn’t touch our investments. It was anxiety inducing to look at them falling deeper and deeper into red every day (at some point we had lost around -€9000 of portfolio worth) but we kept our cool. We did however stop buying new assets until the situation stabilized.

Did we miss out on opportunities to buy assets “on sale”? For sure. The ETF we invest in was at some point 17 EUR cheaper than it is today. We’re in it for the long run though and it felt much safer to keep a larger emergency fund during these crazy times and pause any other financial activities for a while. We’re also beginner investors and decided to not make any rash moves during our first crisis. Our portfolio is currently still showing -€1308 “returns” so we keep being patient and concentrating on the long term view.

Receiving several large sums of money and (involuntarily) cutting spending

Mr Husky finally got his 30% tax ruling approved (and it was applied retroactively too), we received an income tax return of €4000, there was the May holiday payment, I did a lot of unexpected side hustle work, our trips abroad got cancelled (yay…) and we spent our spring staying home and not spending money. All of this contributed to our savings growing a lot.

Home equity rising from €28k to €51k

The crazy part is that only around €3000 of this was actual mortgage payments, the rest is just growth in our home’s value! Welcome to the real estate bubble! And we don’t even live in Amsterdam. Amazing!!!

Looking at goals I set for 2020:

• The net worth growth goal (€175,000) is 65% achieved and I’m positive we will reach €175k. Awesome!
• The portfolio goal of having €125,000 invested by end of year is looking a bit more out of reach. We’re currently at €55,400 so not even halfway there (sorry, Bon Jovi!). I will keep working towards it though as I’m convinced anything is possible if you want it hard enough.

Overall I’m really grateful for how our financial journey is going. When we started in January last year, our net worth was at €40k. And here we are now, €106k later. Excited to see what the rest of 2020 will bring.