Every Monday is Intents and Purchases day at Living Behind the Curve.

You don’t need more money. All the frugality and personal finance bloggers that teach you the esoteric methods of growing your net worth like a vine of plump, juicy tomatoes are wrong. Living with generic toilet paper and suffering through recycled leftovers just so you can have more money is wrong. Money isn’t the point.

Save me the spluttering and indignant declarations of how you need money to pay for living, and how we can’t retire without money, and whatever else. I know that already, and you do too. I’m not saying that money isn’t essential to life, because it is when you live in a capitalist economy. What I am saying is this: people all over the Internet are posting their financial goals and net worth with almost pornographic zeal. There are bars and charts and numbers everywhere to show you just how close a person you’ve never met is to reaching their two million dollar goal. You can find out how much money a mom in Wisconsin saved by switching to cloth diapers, and how to bully your banker into giving you the highest return for your deposit. It’s numbers and percentage points and compound interest all over the place, and for what, a fat bank balance? All the money in the world isn’t going to do you a lick of good if you don’t figure out what you want to do with it.

Look, money is a tool. It won’t buy happiness, but it’ll get you one hell of a lot closer. Before you go drafting a budget or butchering a case of whole chickens, you’ve got to sit down and figure out your big goals and your little goals. My big goals are to live in The Perfect House, and not have to work very hard for someone else so I have the time to enjoy my house. My little goals are to finish college, pay off my credit card debt, and buy a new bed. I’ve sussed out the numbers, and I don’t need to be rich to do this.

Once I do reach one of my goals, big or little, I sit down and reevaluate everything I’m doing. The money I was paying on the credit card balance now goes to the bed fund. I take stock of my life to see if there’s anything new I need or want to do. Say I need to buy a new car. Is it more important than buying the bed? It’s a constant cycle of pondering exactly what it is I want to do with the rest of my life. And I don’t need to be rich to do any of it.

So what are you doing it for?

Every Monday is Intents and Purchases day at Living Behind the Curve.

On Sunday morning, I decided to run a little experiment to see what we are actually worth. Armed with my online account logins and this net worth workbook from Consumerism Commentary, I sat down with a cup of coffee and got to it.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that even with 100% financing on the house we bought a year ago, two car loans, credit card debt, and student loan debt, we have a positive net worth. It may only be $5721 - but it’s still positive!

A few notes about how I calculated this:

• Car values are included here, which is a bit non-traditional, depending on the methods you use. I used estimated private sale values from Edmunds.
• I did not include other assets, like computers or jewelry.

Now we can use this information to set goals, and incorporate them with the goals we already have.

Goals for the month of June: Increase net worth by 25%. (This may seem like a lot, but it’s really only an increase of $1430.25. Those big jumps are easy when your net worth is low. We would be targeting closer to 40%, but we’ll be buying Mer a new laptop this month. We’ll also complete a rough three-year financial plan, to take us up through my college graduation.

Goals for the remainder of 2007: Increase net worth by 300% (from May numbers). This will be a challenge, considering we will both be taking classes (and therefore incurring some student loan debt) in the fall. Finish paying off all credit card debt. Hit the $10k mark in my 401(k).

Building our net worth and getting our financial ducks in a row is a big part of the process for us as we move toward a simpler life. It’s amazing to be out from under (most) of our credit card debt, and I can’t wait for the day that we are completely free from it. I think one of the best decisions we made was to start building a small emergency fund at the same time as we are paying down our debt - having that security now, and building on it once the debt is gone, will allow us to break from the balance-carrying cycle, and move on to other, more interesting debts, like investment properties. At least, that’s the plan.