How to Increase Your Net Worth by $900,000 in 9 Years

One fall night in 2010, my wife Nicole and I were watching the Suze Orman Show. (Yes, I used to DVR it). There was this fun segment where someone would call in and Suze would analyze that person's financial health and give them a grade. It was called How Am I Doing?

One term that we kept seeing over and over again on this segment was “Net Worth”. Since we were personal finance newbies, we had no idea what this meant. Nicole and I were making a combined annual income of $130,000 so we figured our net worth must be HUGE.

After the show was over, we decided to see how rich we really were. There was no doubt in our mind that we’d be better off than most of the jokers that call in to the show and get an “F” grade from Suze!

We walked upstairs and started to write down all of our numbers on a big whiteboard. By separating our “assets” (what we owned) and our liabilities (what we owed) into two big columns, we started to discover that we weren’t rich.

We were kinda broke.

Although we were making a solid income together, our liabilities were much higher than our assets.

Here is a snapshot of what our numbers looked like back in 2010 (rounded educated guesstimates based on me losing some of our data along the way): 

There’s no way were going to get an “A” grade on Suze’s show with a -$50,000 net worth!

This epiphany moment was just the jolt of reality we needed to start making progress on our finances. Our short-term goal was to get this net worth number in positive territory ASAP!

It was time for us to make a change. Here's what we did to increase our net worth by $800,000 in 8 years. 

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