December Expenses – $1101.10

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Here is a breakdown of my expenses for December.

Household $9.90
Rent $440
Entertainment $54.62
Transportation $189.76
Food $161.07
Travel $70.53
Phone $50.78
Health $124.44
Total $1101.10

My December expenses were reasonably low. I expect my monthly expenses will stay around this level for the next few months.

The rent was for 10 nights hotel in Kansas City while I was working on a document review project there. It also includes $125 paid to my mom for staying at her home. The next few months my rent will be very low since I’m staying at my mom’s house and she is only charging me 1/2 of the utilities as rent. I offered to pay more, but half of the utilities is all she wanted to be paid.

Transportation was mainly gas for my car. I drove between KC and southern Missouri several times while working on the document review job. I also had to pay a little over $50 for personal property tax on my car. This month I will only drive to KC one time and otherwise will be working from home so the transportation expense should go way down.

My food expense was about the same as always. It should go down a bit this month since I will be eating at home more often. Spending about $150 a month on food is pretty reasonable so I won’t sweat this expense category too much.

Travel was for taxes and fees on a round-trip airline ticket from a small regional airport near my current home to Shanghai, China. From China I can buy a round-trip ticket to Thailand for less than $200. I was going to delay buying a ticket to Asia then I saw a deal for cheap award flights on Delta from the U.S. to China. When I was able to find a ticket allowing me to start from Springfield, MO I decided to go ahead and get the ticket. The ticket was only 34,000 Delta points which is about half of the regular price.

Being able to leave from Springfield means that I don’t need a domestic positioning flight like last year. For my Asia trip last year I had to buy a positioning flight from KC to LA and also got a hotel in LA for the night since I wanted to be in LA a day early to make sure I didn’t miss my flight due to a delay from KC. Not needing a domestic positioning flight will save me a little money and time. The combination of the low cost of the ticket and the convenience of flying from a nearby airport on one itinerary was enough to convince me to go ahead and book my Asia flight now. It is unlikely there will be a better deal for my circumstances before I leave for Asia.

Phone was for almost two months of Google Fi phone service. When I paused my service in Thailand they didn’t be bill me for the almost full month I had used at that time. After I resumed service they billed me for that almost full month and the new month. This bill will go down to about $25 this month.

Health was for the January premium on my new health insurance. My health insurance premium for this year has gone up about $125 a month. Last year, subsidies were enough to pay my entire health insurance premium. With the rate hike that is no longer the case. I didn’t get much use from my Marketplace insurance last year. I had one doctor visit that I had to pay out of pocket for and then they paid a little towards my prescriptions. If I understand my health insurance coverage correctly, my new policy is a little better. It will allow me to have doctor visits for free or a low co-pay rather than being out of pocket until I hit my deductible like last year. Since I’ve moved I will be visiting a new doctor so I might have a few visits getting things checked out this year.

My student loan payment amount has adjusted from $0 to $132 a month. Since I’m on income-based repayment my premium went up due my higher income in 2017. The total of the required payments will still be less than I voluntarily paid last year so this isn’t really a big deal.

I’m pretty happy with my December expenses.  How was your month?

December 2018 Net Worth Update

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It isn’t quite the end of the year but it is close enough that I am going to make this my end of the year net worth update. This is my first net worth update since last year. I’ll probably continue to just update my net worth once a year unless something happens to significantly affect my net worth during the year.

2018 Year End Net Worth

Assets

  • Cash – $4017
  • Stocks – $2162
  • Misc – $174
  • Solo 401k – $3778
  • Trad IRA- $37,918
  • 401k – $10,552
  • Roth IRA – $1609
  • Property – $1000

Liabilities

  • Student Loan – $121,003
  • Credit Card – $7200

My total assets of $61,210 minus my liabilities of $128,203 results in a year-end net worth of -$66,993. I managed to improve my net worth by a little over $4000 this year.

That is a poor result considering I added $6500 to my IRA and a little over $12,000 to my 401k accounts. The stock market decline resulted in a large portion of this year’s contributions disappearing.

The student loan continues to be a drag on my net worth. Although I paid several thousand dollars on the student loan this year it wasn’t enough to keep up with the interest. The loan accrues over $500 a month in interest which makes it impossible for me to make progress on paying down the loan. Unless my income at least doubles I am not going to be able to pay off the student loan.

I made another mistake of taking a 0% balance transfer on one of my credit cards. I used the money to top off my IRA contribution for the year and invest in some individual stocks. The market decline erased almost all of the money I contributed from the transfer. Nonetheless, the credit card still needs to be paid off before next November. Lesson learned – do not use debt to invest. Actually, I’m going to take that lesson a bit further and state that I will not take on any new debts at all. The only possible exception would be a mortgage and I don’t foresee that happening in the near future.

This year’s results were rather disappointing. The increase in my net worth did not reflect my high saving rate. Looking at the bright side, I now own more shares of the stocks and funds I invested in this year than I did last year so if the stock market rebounds next year my net worth should get a nice boost.

How did your net worth do this year?

December 2018 Life Update

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Since I’ve been back in Missouri from Thailand for about a month now I thought I would share and update of what I’m doing now and what I have planned.

I am currently working on a document review project in Kansas City. I started working on this project Monday of last week and my last day on the project will be next Friday the 28th. The Monday after that I will start my seasonal tax job. I’ll be getting my first paycheck since August this Friday. It will be nice to have money start coming in again.

My job has offered a remote option the last few years, but not for employees that live in Kansas City. Since I broke up with my ex-girlfriend in March of this year and we’re no longer friends the tax job was the only reason for me to stay in KC. I didn’t especially want to stay in KC so I asked my boss if I could work remote from southern Missouri. The answer was affirmative and I have now moved to a small town in southern MO.

I will be living with my mother. This gives me the benefit of low rent and no lease. Of course, it also gives me a lot of time with my mother which is mostly a benefit.

I do plan on returning to Thailand next year as soon as my tax job is over. Thus, I didn’t want to sign a lease anywhere. Renting from a month-to-month place would have been expensive and most of them aren’t great. Moving out of KC and in with my mother should be a great solution to that problem.

The lower living costs plus the lack of a commute should allow me to save quite a bit of money from my tax job. This will hopefully allow me to visit Thailand longer next year. I’m also looking into ways, such as teaching English, that I can earn money while in Thailand.

I’m not sure what my long-term plans are right now. All I currently have figured out is that I will work my tax job and then return to Thailand. I don’t currently think I will ever move to Thailand full-time. I may just split my time between Thailand and the US the next few years. I’ll see how things go with my Thai girlfriend and hopefully figure out my longer-term plans sometime next year.

What Is Currency Trading? A Beginner’s Introduction

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You may never have heard of currency trading, but the reality is that many people use currency trading as a source of income. There are a lot of options for beginners who want to get started with currency trading. Currency trading is also known as forex trading.The word forex is an abbreviation of the words foreign exchange. That is because currency trading is actually trading foreign currencies on a central exchange platform.

There are many forex brokers who will allow you to set up a small account to get started with currency trading. Unlike stock trading,where you are trading money for stocks, with currency trading, you are actually trading money for money. The idea is that the value of each currency fluctuates over time. By investing in the right currencies at the right times, such as right before a currency goes up in value, you can make money. Since you are trading currencies,you are always buying one currency and selling another. You are hoping that one currency pair will go up while the other currency pair will go down.

When talking about currency pairs, we are talking about currencies such as the United States dollar, the Canadian dollar, the European euro, the British pound, the Swiss franc, the Japanese yen, and the Korean won. These are all currencies that can be traded against each other.

There are several huge differences between trading stocks and trading currencies. The first is that you do not need a big amount of money to get started with trading currencies. Many brokers let you set up an account with as little as fifty dollars. We will explain how you can use small amounts of money to make bigger amounts of money soon.

Also, forex is available on a retail scale. You do not have to go work on Wall Street or something to trade forex. You can trade from your own home on a platform offered to you by your broker, available online. Many brokers use MetaTrader 4, which is a software that makes it very easy to trade forex.

Also, trading forex involves the ability to trade with leverage.Different brokers offer different amounts of leverage, but some offer as much as five hundred times your money. This means that even if you only have a small amount of money in your account, you can trade as if you had a much larger amount of money. It is important to note that although you can make more money by using leverage, you can also lose more money if you use leverage. That is why it is important to use leverage carefully.You should always have a risk management strategy in place to make sure that nothing goes wrong.

Forex trading is also one of the most popular ways to make money from home. Of course, it is not something that you can learn overnight. It is recommended that you set up a demo account before you start investing any money in forex. Not all forex traders succeed. The ones that do succeed are the ones that have put in the time and effort to study the markets, both from books and from personal experience.

The great thing about forex is that you can get personal experience without investing any money. All you have to do is open a demo account with any broker with paper money of up to one hundred thousand dollars. This gives you the ability to take your time and figure out a trading strategy that actually works for you.

There are many free resources on the internet to help you learn how to trade currency pairs such as the US dollar and the Korean won.However, nothing will beat personal experience, which is why a demo account is so useful. Once you have played around with a demo account, you can move on to opening a small real account and gradually increase the size of your deposits.

In conclusion, trading forex is a great way to make money from home and become self-employed. However, it requires dedication and is not something that will make you rich overnight. Just be patient and acquire trading skills slowly and gradually.

Weight Loss Goal Results

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Back in August I wrote a post sharing my goal of losing 30 in 3 months. I stated in that post that at the end of the 3 months I would post my result, including before and after pictures, regardless of the outcome. The results post was supposed to be published on November 29, 2018, but as usual I am a bit behind on getting the post up. 

I will warn you now that both the before and after pictures are not pretty. I am rather fat in both the before and after pics. If you don’t want to see a half-naked fat guy you should stop reading now and not scroll down the page any further. You have been warned.

To get straight to the point I did not meet my goal of losing 30 pounds in 3 months. I managed to lose 18.4 pounds in 3 months. I went from 224.8 pounds at the start to 206.4 pounds at the end.  I also went from 30.2% body fat to 25.7% body fat. My BMI dropped below 30 which means I am officially no longer obese, I’m just really overweight.  Although this was well short of my goal I am still pleased to have lost that much weight.

The first couple of months in Thailand I was losing weight pretty steadily.  I was a little behind the pace needed to lose 30 pounds, but I was still on pace to lose almost 25 pounds. However, my weight loss plateaued in November.

My weight loss was achieved with a combination of intermittent fasting, a morning HIIT workout, an afternoon swim, and lots of walking. After the first week of November I moved out of my apartment in Chiang Mai to a hotel with no fitness center or swimming pool. This resulted in a large dropoff in my amount of exercise. Once I returned to the U.S. I continued to not exercise and I also indulged in quite a few foods that I had missed while in Thailand. Not surprisingly, I didn’t lose any weight the last couple of weeks in November. 

Below are my before and after weight loss pics. 

Although I still have a big gut, it isn’t quite as massive in the after pics. The man boobs are also a little smaller. The biggest difference was that I lost some weight from my face which I think made a pretty big change in my appearance.

The shorts I wore in the before pic are now way too big for me. While I was in Thailand I had to take an elastic band and tie two belt loops of the shorts together so I could wear them without them falling down while I was walking. 

I have actually gained a couple pounds already this month. Although I have gotten back on track with my intermittent fasting, I haven’t gotten back into the exercise habit. I need to start exercising consistently and eat better so I can start losing weight again. The fact that I lost quite a bit of weight in Thailand proves I can lose weight. I just need to do the actions necessary to lose the weight.  I’m not going to set a new weight loss goal, instead I will set goals to develop exercise and eating habits that will result in losing weight.