My 1st Million At 33 - yes, you can do it too

Usually I do a monthly review on my networth, but I have been too busy to do this (and anything else). So I will just keep this short as a quick update.

So what has happened to my net worth (from Feb 14 closing to Dec 31st 2007 closing prices)? Bad news first.

First, let me say that my home value has gone down significantly (10% to 20%). That has not been reflected in my net worth page. When I get some time, I will start to mark it to market, and smooth out the losses in several chunks.

Now the really bad news, even worse than my home value going down is that my company options have pretty much gone into nothing. I’ve suffered close to 90+% in this category. Year-to-date (since Jan 1st) the value of my company holdings have gone down by 59.4%.

My net worth has gone down by 7.43% (without counting the dropping home value) mainly because of the huge loss in my company stock.

My own investment however has fared much better. My total stock portfolio has gone down by 3.44% (about 30% of which is contributed by my money manager), while including cash, my cash+stock portfolio has gone down by 1.86%. This compared to a gain of 3.6% in HUI index, 10.9% loss in OIH, 8.4% loss in XLE, 7.6% loss in SPY, 14.2% loss in QQQQ. I guess a loss of 3.44% is probably satisfactory, given that I have incurred some small trading losses, plus some hefty losses in junior mining stocks. Certainly, my cash+stock portfolio compared to the overall market is doing pretty okay, since my loss is less than 2%.

Unfortunately, I simply have not taken enough hedges against my company and real estate holdings. Those positions are so out-sized that I’m usually afraid of taking a big bet. My inaction has certainly caused my overall net worth to suffer tremendously.

In any case, what’s gone is gone. I’m pretty sure that given enough time, I can make those money back. It’s just going to cost me 10 to 15 extra years of my working life, yak!

I was going to do a year-end review for 2007, but it’s probably too late to be meaningful. I know my portfolio was up about 16%, but my net worth was pretty much flat, due to a huge loss of 50+% in my company stock options. I’ve made up quite a bit of those losses through investment gain and savings for the entire year. However, if I count from the peak, I’ve only made up some 40% of the losses in company stock options.

Actually, come to think of it, I probably should start account for the capital gain taxes that I need to pay on my investment gain. I haven’t counted those, but the amount of capital gain tax that will be due is getting so big that it’s actually going to affect my net worth. I would never imagine that this is going to be an issue when I started logging my net worth on this blog (only 2 years ago). For now, I’m just going to leave it at that. I just have too much that I need to take care and I don’t have time yet to account for everything in the last details.