Despite a month of heavy spending, including some large upfront purchases (e.g. paying my annual private health insurance premium upfront), I was able to increase my net worth by almost $8k due to working some extra days during the Christmas break. As a contractor, every day you don’t work you don’t get paid. So I elected to work right up to Christmas, including the Christmas Eve Monday. As a result, my paychecks in January were larger than usual, offsetting the high spend.



Some key achievements this month:

1. Closed my Interactive Brokers CFD trading account. No more short term margin trading for me.

2. Opened a SelfWealth account and bought $10k of $AFI and $10k of $VGS (I used your referral code Dave from SMA).

3. Continued to sell down the crypto portfolio, cashing out another $5k worth.

4. Optimised some of my bills, resulting in projected annual savings of $1,451.





Bill optimisation

Private Health Insurance

Switched my private health insurance from Aus Unity Silver Extras ($166/month) to Bupa Bronze Extras ($110/month, or $1320/year). The only thing I use extras for is dental, so I can still do my bi-annual check up with Bupa at a no-gap provider.



Annual saving = $672



Public Transport

Started buying a Myki Pass ($5.30/day), instead of using Myki Money ($8.70/day).

A 33 day (25 business days) Myki Pass cost me $175.

Using Myki Money for that same period would be $8.70 * 25 = $217.50

That’s a saving of $1.70 per business day, and I work on average 230 business days per year.



Annual saving = $391



Internet

Even though I’ve moved out of home for almost 4 years now, I still pay for my mum’s internet bill. It’s been on direct debit and it’s just something I’ve always done, perhaps as a thank you for her paying for such expensive internet when I was growing up. I still remember when ADSL1 first came out, she was paying $90/month for the 1.5mbps plan which was the fastest speed available at the time. But man was I the coolest kid when everyone else had 56k dial-up.

She was on an old Optus cable plan paying $60/month for unlimited data. However she barely uses much data, maybe 100gb per month at most. So I found the perfect Optus mobile internet plan for her on OzBargain.

It was a Optus mobile SIM only plan, and for $60/month on a 24 month contract ($1440 over 2 years) you get:

1. 200gb of data per month

2. A Samsung Galaxy Tab S4

3. 12 months’ worth of Netflix subscription

I sold the Samsung tablet on Gumtree for $800, and I added the Netflix credit to my account ($168 worth). I did have to buy her a mobile broadband modem outright though (for $192), so it works out to be:

(Plan cost + modem) – (selling tablet + value of Netflix credit)

($1440 + $192) – ($800 + $168) = $664

$664 / 24 months = $27.67/month



Annual saving = $388﻿

Thanks OzBargain!

Crazy how fast mobile internet is becoming – depending on the location it’s so much faster than NBN. I’m on Telstra and this is from my place which is relatively close to a cell tower.



Here are the usual numbers and pretty graphs.

Net Worth Tracker﻿

Sharesight Portfolio. Looking forward to $AFI dividends this month!



Thanks again for reading! See you next month.