Net Worth and Spending 2025

I realize that it’s late to do a financial recap of 2025, but that’s what happens when you get three months ahead in posts…you simply slot the next one into the first available slot…and this is what was available. Haha.

If it helps, I’m writing this in early January, so all is fresh to me. It’s just that you’re reading it much later than that.

All that said, I wanted to share a financial update because it’s been a few years since the last one. I don’t do them often these days because they seem both repetitive and boring, two things I try to avoid in blog posts. But this one revealed some very interesting information that I thought was worth sharing.

It’s funny that I’m doing this now because as I was working on it I received this comment:

I’m reviewing my 2025 investment performance (pretty nice) and wanted to show my wife how you share your numbers. Did you stop doing these reviews in 2022? If not, where do they live now?

Hahaha. I did stop doing them (for the reasons above). The last one was 2021 Financial Year in Review and 2022 Forecast. This post won’t have the same content as that one, but it will give a major financial update, so I think it fits the bill.

Net Worth Review

Every year in the Millionaire Money Mentors forums we have a thread on where everyone’s net worth ended for the year.

It’s one of my favorite threads because 1) a large percentage of the forum members share, 2) it’s a great catch up with how everyone is doing and what’s going on in their lives, 3) there are often thoughts on future plans (which are interesting), and 4) in years like 2025, it’s very nice to celebrate with everyone.

Most of the posts are about growth of net worth, what people are doing to become wealthier, and so on. But for me the net worth goals have changed over the past few years. What once was focused on growth has now shifted to maintenance/decumulation.

When one of the mentors started the thread near the end of December, I didn’t have my year end numbers yet, but I responded based on my new goals:

I’m at the point where I want my net worth to decline each year. If it does not, I consider that a failure of spending and giving.

It’s going to be close this year…

We’re going for a declining net worth because an ever-increasing one simply means several bad things (to us):

• We saved too much, which means we either worked too long before retiring or didn’t enjoy our money as much as we could have during the accumulation phase (both of these are already true…I just don’t want to make it worse.)
• We aren’t spending enough in retirement based on our net worth.
• We aren’t giving enough (which is really just another form of spending) in retirement based on our net worth.

Besides, why are we sitting on all these assets anyway? Is the point to accumulate as much as humanly possible in our lifetimes and then distribute it all after we die. That sounds like a losing plan. He who dies with the most wealth is still dead, right? My plan is to finish well and use my wealth intentionally to the bitter end.

When I posted the comments above, I had a couple responses like this:

Are you aiming to die with zero?

This is a reference to the book Die with Zero which I’ve covered in a long series at ESI Money. We’ve also discussed the pros and cons of the book quite extensively in the forums. There’s no complete agreement on it but the general sentiment is that:

• It’s worth a read as it’s thought-provoking and offers a perspective worth considering.
• It’s a crazy concept that no one wants to attempt as the downside risk (running out of money before you run out of life) comes with terrible consequences.

This is where I net out. Truly trying to die with zero net worth would stress me out completely. And as I’ve written, I don’t want any money stress in my retirement.

So I responded as follows:

No. But I’ve written a more balanced book with a less snazzy title called “Die with Less than $5 Million.”

Hahaha.

My point is that there is (at least for me) a sweet spot where I have enough and I can enjoy the rest by either spending it or giving it away.

Otherwise, what’s the point? Should I just sit back for the next 20 years and let it accumulate and grow? What would the purpose of that be? To see how big I can make it? That just seems so selfish and a waste.

I know some might want to “run up the score” just to see how high they can go, and that’s their right. If it works for them, great. But that’s not for me. I’d rather direct the funds myself than leave that up to someone else once we’re past.

So we’re looking at managing our net worth over the years so it’s more effective for both us and others. This will require it decreasing over time. And no, I don’t have a specific timeline at the moment…just a general direction.

2025 Net Worth

So that was my point of view going into the year-end review.

Once the final numbers came in, here’s what I posted:

Well, the results are in and 2025 was a failure for me. Failure in the sense that net worth was UP despite my best efforts.

Net worth was $7.4 million, up $127k. What? How did that happen? A very strong stock market and a lack of “real” spending. Here are the specifics…

Before we get into the details of 2025, let’s do a quick review of how far we’ve come:

• I retired in 2016 with $3.3 million. At that point, my plan was to live off savings and income from our rental properties (which was about $60k a year.) As you’ll see, this amount is plenty for us…even today. That said, if we just had that amount it’s likely that we wouldn’t have moved to Florida and then NC as those required substantial financial resources to pull off.
• You can’t just sit around in retirement, so one of my activities was writing in my (then) new blog ESI Money. I did what I had done with Free Money Finance — wrote what I know, what I was doing, what I was reading, etc. Oh yeah, and I started a little series that interviewed millionaires. 😉
• I was having a blast writing (in addition to my other retirement activities) and the site took off. It quickly turned into a very nice side gig that generated enough income, combined with the properties, that I didn’t need to withdraw any assets. It was awesome! I was doing something I loved that helped others and that brought in a decent income. I spent maybe 10 hours a week on it and those hours were completely flexible, so it was a perfect retirement job.
• Then I saw an opportunity and bought Rockstar Finance. I ran it a couple years until it started feeling more like a normal job, then I sold it at a very nice profit. At this point I was still making way more than we spent so the extra dollars were being invested, mostly into index funds.
• After a while of just ESI Money, I got the itch to start something new and created the Millionaire Money Mentors, which is still going strong today.
• Along the way I sold my rental properties at what now looks like close to the top of the market, which was also nice. We also did well on the sales of our homes in Colorado and Florida, so with all that and a huge market run, we got to where we are today, despite spending on whatever we want and upping our giving (more on these in a minute).

It wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns.

I did invest in real estate syndications as well. These did well for the first couple of years and returned what they promised. But then I ran into interest rate and cost hikes, a fire at one place, and what looks to be fraud with one investor. In the end, between what I earned and what I expect to lose, we’re down about $200k in these investments.

But the big loss is the opportunity cost. If I had put that money into index funds it would have done really, really well. Of course hindsight is always 20/20. If I had put all my money into Amazon back in the day that would have been even more awesome! lol

Ok, with that trip down memory lane over, let’s get into 2025 spending.

2025 Spending

In this section I’ll share portions of what I wrote in my report (which will be bold and italic as above) and then offer some extra commentary now and then.

I started with this…

Spending on Quicken is listed as $437k. Hahaha. That’s not a real number. It’s part of a catch up from 2024 and part of the way I do my accounting in Quicken. Let’s break it down.

If you’ve ever used a program like Quicken you know that there are a gazillion ways to set it up and records things. I’m a bit of a wannabe accountant anyway (it was originally my undergraduate major until I got completely bored with it), so I take my Quicken tracking to another level sometimes. Hahaha.

We gave my daughter and son-in-law (plus a few other “donations” — my account for non-tax-deductible gifts — the vast majority was to the kids) $134k in 2025. They used the money to help them purchase their house (these were the gifts that set off the infamous Chase fiasco.) We had given the kids money in 2024 as well, so we ended up helping them to the tune of $200k for their $600k+ home.

A couple comments here:

• Our “donations” account is for gifts we make to others that are not tax deductible. These include gifts to the kids, gifts to others (like our trash people, etc. at Christmas), gifts to workers we have at the house and workers at the YMCA (we give Amazon gift cards), and so forth.
• The $200k to the kids was an advance on their inheritance. We are believers that we should help them out when they need it (now) and not wait until we die (when hopefully they are settled anyway) to get any money.

In case you missed the Chase issue, start by reading Chase Closed My 25-Year Account. It’s quite the saga. I still have the account but do the vast majority of my banking with Fidelity these days.

Charitable giving was $102k. This is what went out of our Donor-Advised Fund (DAF) plus a few cash gifts which were much smaller. Technically we gave away an additional $100k in our DAF (which would have put us close to break even in net worth) as I sold stock into the DAF at the end of the year. But I account for funds in a DAF as an asset (I know, I don’t own them but I consider them “Prepaid Giving”), then realize them as “expenses” when we make the grants. The $100k at the end of the year will fund our 2026 giving.

BTW, we fund our DAF with appreciated assets so there’s no cash outflow with these.

A few comments here:

• When you contribute to a DAF, you send them funds and you get the complete tax write-off in the year you transfer the money. Then you can grant that money to qualifying charities at any time. You no longer own those dollars (you can’t get them back) but you have the ability to direct them to charities in a week, a month, a year, or years down the road.
• One of the big benefits of DAF is that you can gift appreciated investments without paying any taxes on them. So if you have a stock you bought at $100 and it’s now worth $500, you can give all $500 to the DAF and not owe taxes on the $400 in gains. Plus the charity gets more than if you sold the stock, paid taxes, and gave what was leftover.
• Unfortunately you can’t do this with appreciated funds in an IRA (you eventually can do Qualified Charitable Distributions, which are similar, but you need to be 70.5 years old), so we’ve been using assets in our taxable account. Because the market has been so strong, we keep giving out of that fund but somehow it has retained about the same balance for almost a decade.
• That said, we have now given all of our index funds out of that account and only have the dividend stocks I bought in 2020 left in that account.
• Every year I have placed $100k of index funds from the taxable account into the DAF at the start of the year, then we send that money out in chunks of $10-$20k throughout the year. This year I made a second contribution in December because the new tax rules starting in 2026 made it better to give more in 2025. So I donated 625 shares of Nucor (NUE) (one of the dividend stocks which I bought in 2020 for $20k and was now worth $104k — BTW, the stock price run-up made the current dividend yield only 1.32%). We’ll send that money out throughout 2026.
• I account for these funds as a transfer in Quicken from the taxable account to a DAF “asset” account, so when I give them there’s no change in net worth. Then as I send donations out to charities, I deduct them from the DAF balance and they are recorded as an expense.

I know, it’s a bit complicated but it allows me to know how much I have in the DAF account at all times and spreads out the cost of giving throughout the year.

$100k was paid back to my dad. He loaned us money (at 5%) for one year to help us pay cash for our house. I could have paid him back as soon as our home in The Villages sold, but he wanted the 5% for the whole 1-year term. Note that this transaction had no impact on net worth as $100k cash went out but a $100k liability was paid to offset it.

We bought our NC house with cash we got from several sources: real estate syndications that had gone full cycle, excess cash from the sale of our Colorado house that wasn’t in syndications, and $200k borrowed from my dad. The $200k was borrowed in two separate $100k chunks, both for a year at 5%. I paid one off in 2024 after our Florida house sold and paid the second in March 2025 when it was due after a year.

With the money left over from the Florida house we kept some in cash and gave the kids $200k for their home as noted above.

Real 2025 Spending

All the transactions so far were unusual and not what I’d call “real” spending — the sort of spending we’d do on our own under normal circumstances for our needs, wants, and desires. That’s what we’re getting into now.

Here’s how I continued with my review…

So now we’re down to $101k in spending…true spending.

Of that, $60k was taxes. Hahaha. You’re welcome, America.

This included all taxes…income for federal and state plus $7k in property taxes. This is after the $8k check I got for over-payment in 2024 and on top of $23k we overpaid in 2024 that we carried over.

The main issue here is that my CPA is ultra-conservative and we use the safe harbor to pay taxes. In 2024 we had capital gains on the sale of our home in The Villages, so taxes were high then. On top of that I did IRA conversions to a Roth in 2025 (which we paid extra taxes on). The result was a big tax bill.

However I think we overpaid by quite a bit, so I expect a massive refund this year. But we won’t know about it until September or so when I file, so we’ll still pay high estimated taxes this year. By 2027, all this should wash out.

I’m looking forward to the day when my taxes are simple.

I can start to see the faint glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s a ways off still.

Now here’s the bombshell finding…

So that means we actually spent $41k on living. I am stunned by that amount because it feels like I am living an extremely rich life. There isn’t anything I want that I don’t buy. And yet we only spent an actual pittance this past year (yes, it helps we have no house payment.)

Our main spending was:

• • Food (in home and eating out…which we do a lot with the kids): $9400
  • House (inside items and repairs): $8000
  • Utilities: $5200
  • Medical: $5000
  • Christmas: $3600

There’s actually more spending in the house…maybe a few thousand more…but I didn’t expense those as they were capital improvements that saw cash go out and the value of the house increase (those are the accounting entries), so they weren’t “expenses.” This was mostly for the work we had done in the garage which transformed it into a very nice space.

But even with that, spending was below $50k — which seems almost impossible to me because I felt like I spent a “crazy” amount on action figures and clothes — but apparently I was incorrect.

I am still in wonder about how we could live on so little. Essentially when it seems like Amazon stops here daily. Hahaha.

We buy whatever we want whenever we want. And yet we don’t spend much at all. Sure, no house payment and no kids helps a lot, but still — $40-$50k seems really low.

I continued with this…

Anyway, it is hard to spend more than you take in when the market is up 16% and you have $5 million in the market. At some point we’re going to have a flat/down market though…then it will be easier. lol

Yes, in years like 2025 you need big-time spending to spend more than the market gives you.

Of course most of our funds are in IRAs anyway, and we wouldn’t want to spend/give them because of the taxes anyway, so there is that.

But I had my plans…

As for spending in 2026, I have some candidates for consideration. The one caveat is that the spending has to make me happier/better off. I’m not going to spend on things that make life worse simply to spend.

So here are my list of candidates:

• Give more.
• Complete the house work. We have two rooms to finish and want some outside lighting.
• Travel. Not big travel as I can’t think of a place far away where the pleasure of being there is higher than the pain of getting there. I would like to spend some time at the NC beaches and mountains this year. Maybe as much as a month in the mountains during the summer.

Other than those things, I am out of ideas for where to spend money that would make me happier. I am living an awesome life and I don’t want to mess it up with something that would weigh me down (like a second house).

We’ll see what happens…

And that’s it.

I have my giving set aside for 2026 (as noted above) but maybe we’ll fund more out of current income or put more dividend stocks in our DAF.

I know our kids would be happy to receive larger gifts from us this year. Hahaha.

Even a nice place on the beach and the same in the mountains for a month between the two might cost $10k total. That’s some added spending, but there’s still a long way to go.

As I said above, we’ll see what happens.