Just a 48-year-old mom of 2 in Northern California. My kids are Monkey Monkey(MM) and Drama Llama (DL). I am married to Monkey Hubby (MH). Our net worth increased by $115K in 2025. This works out to $14K retirement contributions & a $96K increase in stocks. Cash/investments down $5,000 (re: college costs). Mortgage was paid down by $10K. Home values remain steady.
Re: my sidebar big picture goal, the goal has been surpassed. Still have two more years to reach goal so will leave it there. Will see how future stock market fluctuations shake out. It's my 'financial independence' goal, which doesn't mean anything until my kids are done with college and our mortgage is paid off (only then can we live comfortably on a lot less.) So that's one more reason to let the next two years shake out before evaluating progress on this goal.
I suppose if the 'financial independence' goal is surpassed, there's really no need to track any further. Future net worth gains should be about 99% stock market and real estate gains. It would not be necessary to add to our investments. But I will make an estimate of where I expect things to land in 2026. There's just no specific goal that would need to be hit.
Historically, we had a goal to increase net worth by $60K per year. & of course, I'd expect this number to go down if we are no longer aggressively saving for retirement.
Estimate Net Worth Change for 2026:
Mortgage: Paydown $10,000 <---Regular payments + $1,500
Retirement: Contribute $14,000 <---Minimum for employer match
Investment Gains: $30,000 <---Investments doing the hard work for us
TOTAL INCREASE: $54,000
Our net worth changes never look anything like our estimate (it's rare any asset class actually has an average year). But, I go through this exercise just to make sure my goal is realistic and doable. Or in this case, just to see what we can expect this year.
I am just presuming that other savings/investing and college spending will mostly be a wash.
Note: Current net worth is $1.4 Mil. Enough to give us a $1 Mil nest egg and paid-for home.
Edited to add: I just noticed that if we cashed out everything but retirement and $30K emergency fund, we could pay off our mortgage. So tempting! It's not going to happen because I have college bills to pay and some of this money technically belongs to my kids. It just makes me wonder how much longer until we just write the check and move on from mortgage life. It might be in 2-3 years.
& to be clear, no way on earth we'd have $1 Mil, if we paid off our mortgage sooner. It's been a financial/strategic decision to keep to this point. & you can also argue that keeping the mortgage longer helped us to not borrow money for college (or for anything else). But as we hit our financial independence goal and the final college stretch... There is no longer any reason to have a mortgage.
January 3rd, 2026 at 11:41 pm 1767483704