December 2008 Site and Net Worth Review (+6.54%)

Net Worth Review

The S&P 500 gained +0.8% in December and went from 896.24 to 903.25. But for a full year, the S&P 500 dropped -38.5% from 1468.36 to 903.25 — ouch! According to NetworthIQ, my net worth rose +3.44% and my net investable assets increased +6.54%.

Highlights

Home value actually went up slightly in December, but for the full year it was down -7.8% or -$48,344. I am not sure what caused the rebound in December — may be it’s the currently low mortgage rate.
Retirement investments increased +6.1%, but dropped -26.7% for the year. The drop wasn’t as bad as the S&P 500 because I added money to our retirement accounts throughout the year and our retirement portfolios are diversified — i.e., bonds, REITs, and international equities.
I will write more about peer-to-peer lending this week. In short, I haven’t done much with Prosper since it doesn’t accept new loan, but I have been reinvesting money in my Lending Club account.

Overall, my net worth is down -13.0% and my investments are down -24.3% in 2008. Not good, but not terrible considering what’s going on with the stock market and the economy.

Alternative Income

I closed out the year with alternative income from my web businesses exceeding the 17% goal by almost a full percentage point. Basically, my projected alternative income against my total income (salary + alternative income) ended up at 17.93%. For 2009, my goal is to double my alternative income, which is approximately a 32% goal — aggressive, but achievable.

Blog Review

This month, I made some improvements to the blog, which you may have not noticed. Some of the changes include:

Updated left sidebar on the home page to make several features more accessible.
Changed to the main navigation bar to make key features — e.g., financial directory, freebies, credit cards, making money, frugal living, and investing — accessible from all pages.
Addition of financial definitions with Wikipedia-style links from various articles.

Performance

December was a rather slow month due to the holidays, and many key stats dropped considerably. Here are the results:

Subscribers dropped slightly from 2,224 to 2,219
Search traffic dropped -20% from 36,681 to 29,364
Visitors dropped -22% from 60,499 to 47,016
Page views dropped -20% from 88,144 to 70,380

Top 10 Referrers

Thank you to all 769 web sites and blogs that sent visitors my way. Despite listing only the top 10, I do appreciate everyone’s help. Here are the top referrers this month:

* Indicates the winners of 125×125 banner ad spot.

Again, thank you to my readers and fellow bloggers for your support.

6 Comments

Trevor - 14 Year Old Money Blogger
January 5, 2009, 8:50

Great job at increasing your net worth. Unfortunately your website statistics dropped but it should increase in the future because it was the holiday season.
Lems
January 5, 2009, 10:25

Freaking stock market killed my net worth to for the year, especially my 401K (-25%). A little bit of money I have on Lending club is doing better though (+9%).
For your write up on P2P lending, I’d like to know what your thoughts are on investing more on it, or going back to the stock market, since it is “discounted”.
Steve
January 5, 2009, 12:06

Pinyo, thanks for your example of tracking all your information. That is an essential habit for building financial wealth. I would like to know what kinds of tools you use to track your website statistics.
Pinyo
January 5, 2009, 15:59

@Trevor — Yes, I am hopeful that it will pick back up.
@Lems — -25% is not bad…all things considered. My peer-to-peer lending is doing better as well, but I am taking some hits from defaults (I’ll share this on Wednesday).
@Steve — I am using Google Analytics for my site statistics.
Mrs Money
January 7, 2009, 13:24

Wow, that’s awesome your net worth increased. Congrats!
Chiko
January 9, 2009, 14:52

I would love to start doing monthly updates on my networth or blog stats. I haven’t decided yet, but I want to because I like how you are doing it.