I just checked the last time I posted to our blog and it’s been over 10 months.. Whoops. 2020 has been a wild year for dozens of reasons and things have seemed to have gotten crazy for us in the Rumsey home. There’s been quite a few changes this year, most of which have been really good changes.
The biggest change has been the uptick in Tara’s business. Tara started a small business right around when Rhett was born, but just recently has started to pump a lot of time and energy into it. Things have gone really well for her and continues to be a good thing for our family. Check out her shop here.
We refinanced our home.
Mortgage rates continue to drop to record low levels and home prices continue to rise in the area we live in. Our home appreciated $80k in value a year and half after we bought it! The refinance lowered our payment and got rid of PMI. With the renters in our basement, our portion of the mortgage is now only $600 :). Having the smaller payment has allowed us to save more, have more fun and enjoy our home more. Our home has been such a blessing to us.
Covid-19.
Like everyone in the world, we were highly affected by covid-19. My job at BYU decided to make everyone who could, work from home. Luckily for me, I was already making a plan to work from home before everything went down so I was ready to make it happen. I moved my entire office setup to Tara’s crafts room and have loved being home all the time. Working from home has definitely changed my outlook on my job and the future of my job. I have so much flexibility because of this and I love it! If I want to eat lunch with Tara and the boys, I just walk upstairs and can be back to work at a moment’s notice. I also can work from anywhere in the US. In fact, I took 8 days to go to Idaho and worked from there. One of the bright spots of this dumb virus!
Investments.
Almost all of my investments took a sharp decline because of covid-19 and the subsequent “recession”. In March, I saw most of my investments go negative before bouncing back to new highs this August. The market has been acting strangely in my opinion. It certainly made sense for the market to drop when everything shut down because of the virus, but it didn’t make sense when the market quickly rebounded despite record highs for unemployment. There was definitely a lot of pessimism to go around, but the stock market kept chugging along. Most recently, however, the market took another sharp decline and may continue with the election tomorrow.
Net worth.
Our net worth has grown since the last time I gave an update. Our home continues to grow in value and our investments rebounded from the downturn. Accounting for our home value minus what we owe plus our current investments + cash, our net worth is now $133,680. Not bad for being negative in early 2017.
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or any future articles you would like from us, please feel free to leave a comment below, or email us at thefundfamily@gmail.com