Saturday, May 02, 2015

Moominvalley April 2015 Report

The Australian Dollar rose for a change from 76.24 US cents to 78.66 US cents, which means that this month we did better in US Dollar terms than in Australian Dollar terms. World stock market indices gained but the Australian market fell. The MSCI World Index rose 2.95%, the S&P 500 0.96%, and the ASX200 fell 1.70%. In Australian Dollar terms we lost 1.10% and in US Dollar terms we gained 2.04%. So we underperformed the international markets but outperformed the Australian market (again).

Commodities did very poorly this month - down 3.67%. Partly because of dividend timing private equity was the best performer in our portfolio.

Net worth fell $9k to $1.269 million not counting housing equity and rose $US24k to $US0.998 million. Including housing equity net worth fell $8k to $1.466 million ($US1.153 million). The monthly accounts (in AUD) follow:


Current non-investment income (salary etc.) was $13.7k and retirement contributions were $3.2k.  Total investment returns were -$14.0k. Spending on the current account fell to $8.6k. Removing some business expenditures that will be refunded it was $4.2k. However, this number doesn't include mortgage interest, which was $2.3k of actual spending, for a total monthly spend of $6.5k (see last column core expenditure). I expect that this will be the typical monthly expenditure when we don't make any large extra expenses... If we hadn't reduced our mortgage interest using our offset account we would have paid $2.4k in mortgage interest. This gap will get much bigger next month. I am recording the saved mortgage interest as part of our investment income. But as this isn't actual cash we receive it has to be offset somewhere else in the accounts. We do this by recording housing expenditure - i.e. mostly mortgage interest - to include the saved interest. Core housing expenditure is what we actually spent on mortgage interest.

We repaid $3.3k of the mortgage resulting in net saving on the housing account of $841. So, we saved a total of $5.9k.