Happy New Year to all!

I'm spending some of my New Year's Eve downloading year-end numbers for our portfolio. My goal was to end the year with $3.3 million and we just made it with a final total of $3,302,333.14.

That represents an increase of $1,677,361.02 for the year. Of course, the bulk of that came from the inheritance I received when my cousin died, but he "only" left me about $1.2 M. The rest is from growth of our existing holdings and the growth on that money once it became mine.

I'm certainly happy with that, but it could have been more except that $551,000 is still tied up in the estate account earning nothing. All of the paperwork has been filed to release it - over two months ago actually - but the court hasn't gotten around to it yet. Hopefully sometime early in 2022 that money will come into my control and I can start putting it to work for us.

Our year-end asset allocation is still overly conservative, thrown off by that 551K sitting in cash. We are now at:

Stock 58.12%

Bond 18.79%

Cash 23.09%

I haven't started to analyze performance yet. I just know that 7 of our holdings ended the year at or near their 52-week high and 4 ended at or near their 52-week low. The rest fell somewhere in between. Not too bad overall.

I hope everyone had a successful 2021 and I wish you all a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2022.

I haven't crunched the numbers in detail but big picture, here's how our spending stacked up for the past 3 years.

2019: $81,200

2020: $70,600

2021: $88,400

There was also a large one-time expense in 2021 not included there. We paid the lawyer handling my late cousin's estate $14,500. Technically that was paid from the estate (even though I was the sole beneficiary of the estate so ultimately it was my money either way) but I certainly don't need to count that when doing future spending projections.

We had one other large expense this year spending $10,200 for a home repair. If not for that, our 2021 spending would have come in a few thousand under 2019. We're not quite back to pre-pandemic spending yet.

We have trimmed a couple of costs over the past year or so. We cut cable in November 2020. Just this past month, I dropped DW's life insurance and one of my disability insurance policies. Our daughter aged off our health insurance in October but we're now paying out of pocket for her therapy as her new plan doesn't cover it.

Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with where our numbers are at this point. I dropped to part time at the end of November so my income dropped by 1/3. That should still have me earning more than we're spending with a little to spare. That was pretty much my goal - earn enough to pay the bills and still save a bit and not have to touch the nest egg yet.