It was quite an up and down ride in 2008… mostly down for my finances.

It was a tumultuous year for the stock market that saw the Dow Jones drop 34%. It also has seen a credit crisis that is making it more difficult to borrow. Here are some of the ugly highlights for my finances this past year.

ASSETS

• Cash (-7.15%)
  My cash reserves did go down a bit but in my opinion are still in an acceptable position. In this economy I think that is a pretty good stockpile in case either my wife or I lose our jobs.
• Stocks (-36.15%)
  I took an absolute bloodbath in the market this year. I took (in hindsight) a terrible position in Citigroup at $22.96 and failed to bail out of my position in NovaStar Financial when I should have seen the writing on the wall. I did have a couple bright spots, but its definitely made me realize I need to have an earlier exit strategy for my investment.
• Retirement (-22.19%)
  This one is probably the most disheartening of all. I made almost $16,000 worth of contributions to my retirement accounts in 2008 and still was down $16,519.37 from January. So in reality this is more like -44% in actual performance if you remove the contributions.

DEBTS

• Mortgage (-2.18%) & Student Loans (-15.45%)
  I pretty much just made standard payments on my mortgage and student loans this year. I thought about refinancing my mortgage when rates were down in early 2008 but didn’t pull the trigger. Now with rates plummeting again hopefully 2009 I can lock in some more savings.
• Credit Cards (-3.60%)
  For years I have been unconcerned with this debt as the abundance of 0% credit card offers have made it easy to just bounce this around. However now with the looming credit crisis its getting harder to find those offers. I think I should have focused a bit harder on paying some of this down to get it to a level where I could bounce it around on 1 card instead of needing 2-3.

FINAL TALLY

So here are the actual numbers for 2008. Here’s to hoping for a better 2009!

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