Julia recently posted about how we're still donating 50%, which included this chart of monthly spending from our 2024 spending update:

While each year before 2024 we'd been saving some, 2024 was the first year in which we were drawing from savings to make donations. Noticing this prompted David Denkenberger to ask:

If you don't mind me asking, how does the return on your investments factor in? E.g., is the negative savings offset by return such that your net worth is not falling?

This is a good question! Our net worth hasn't been something I've been regularly calculating, but this seemed like a good opportunity to figure out how it's changed over time.

Things I counted:

• Liquid: cash in our bank account, stocks we own in a standard investment account.

• Retirement: 401k, HSA

• House: value of the house according to Zillow, less loan balance

Things I didn't count:

• Credit card balances (we pay these off in full each month)

• The value of our other stuff, which has been going up a bit over time. The biggest single possession is probably our half of the shared car (~$2.9k), followed by my mandolin (~$2k). A full accounting here would be a ton of work.

• The value of my 7,049 options for Wave and 56 shares of Zepz, from when I was laid off from Wave. I have no idea how much these are worth.

• Human and social capital.

While I would have liked to go back to ~2008 when we had essentially zero net worth, since I haven't been tracking this I was reliant on the records various providers keep, which seem to go back ten years. I took values as of June 1st each year when possible, because right around the end of the year there's a lot of variability due to when donation related transactions hit our bank account. In cases where I could only get January 1st numbers I interpolated to get a June 1st number. I adjusted for inflation using the CPIAUCSL, so I could do this in constant 2024-06-01 dollars.

Here's the chart:

The biggest factor is appreciation on our house (which is bad), followed by the stock market doing well (which is good).

To answer David's question, it looks like our net worth hasn't been going down as we draw from savings. This seems like more reason to continue donating half, and not to respond to our now-lower income by donating a smaller fraction.

(I continue to be quite unsure how to think about saving for retirement and kids college.)