Wow, a month has gone by since my last update. The month of July is peak-summer time, especially for folks in my part of the world! Rain gods take a breather, sun shines for better part of 24 hours and travel is in the air!  It was no different for AVI family, and we took a week off- daily grind to enjoy some family time together and traveling.  Back in 2019, we took a family vacation to Disneyland California and this year we choose Disney World Florida as the destination spot coupled with a few days breather along the Atlantic Shores!

I will write a separate blog detailing our trip, but for now it suffices to mention that we were lucky to eek out a vacation in Florida about a week or so prior to the recent surge in Covid-19 cases resulting from the Delta Variant.  In the hindsight, following our trip, I am not at all surprised by the news of surging cases in Florida. While we were in Florida, we were amazed to see no-one abiding by the mask mandate and almost all touristy place were jam-packed with people mingling around in close-proximity of each other.

In anycase, back to the topic of the blog, numbers on monthly net-worth updates. Without any further ado, here we go:

• Net Worth (as percentage of FI number): 121.83
• Accessible Net Worth (as percentage of FI number): 74.9
• Liquid Assets/ Debt Ratio: 3.947
• Cash Balance/Two Year Living Expense Ratio: 1.08

Synopsis

• Off the bat, lets zoom into the month-to-month drop in investment growth for AVI Retirement portfolio. Its been more than a year (1 year 3 months, to be precise) since we saw any drop in AVI family investment portfolio’s. The relentless upward market trajectory has begun to sputter in the recent months, especially for my style of investing.
• The marginal gains in non-retirement portfolio, is actually the result of uptick in financial stocks in the past week and the rally in BRK-B and FB stocks, which represent a significant portion of AVI non-retirement portfolio.
• Primary residence value went up quite a bit. Its not that suddenly property market in our neighborhood became super-hot (its hot for sure), rather because of the update on public profile of our residence on Redfin (website I use to track house price) to account for some rennovations that we made recently.
• The uptick in checking account is due to the fact that I am looking at yet another big expense on property rennovation in the month of August and as such I have been less conservative about moving funds out of checking account.
• The significant drop in CC is because, I paid of quite a few monthly pending bills on CC and the clock on CC resets in the first week of each month.

On macro metrics, the ratio of liquid net worth to debt is reaching a healthy multiple of 4X. Increasingly this is tempting me to basically pay off the loan on our home (the primary source of debt).  Why am I not paying off the mortgage already? Laziness, I guess. It turns out that to pay-off mortgage, I have to order a pay-off report in mail, and then make arrangements with the loan provider to wire-transfer the payoff amount. Add to the fact that I still see pockets of opportunities for investments, working towards the goal of deriving passive dividend-income of atleast $40,000 a month (yet another topic for a future blog post).

Video/Book/Article/Audios for this blog post

With kids home and work, I am findings less and less time for solo activities such as above. However, given that its been a month since my last post, I do have some interesting items to share here

• Book: Atomic Habits, by James Clear. I started reading this book recently, primarily to better understand my lack of progress in meeting health goals. I am trying to figure out a schedule/routine in my daily life for exercise-routines and no matter what I do, it always seem to regress into the background. James has some practical tips to share, one that stuck in mind, temptation-bundling!
• Article: Nice summary of past six-months in charts. One of the fascinating charts to me was, the PMI index, which reached highest ever since 1980s.  Another interesting chart, points to the total assets held by the FEDs, crossing 8.02 Trillion and counting. The bubbling of SPAC mania and high-growth tech-names was also quite interesting!
• Article: This article offers some justification for why I should not panic yet! The growth to value reversal has just begun.
• Article: Bill Miller 2Q 2021 Market Letter. The concluding paragraph succinctly summarizes my view on the markets and my hesitancy to pay off mortgage!