Up and down

Bit of an up and down week for me in the ol' personal finance department. (Incidentally, I apologize for the lack of posting. Rather than some clicheed "I promise to post more, readers" vow, all I can say is my laptop died so I haven't had non-work related internet access in over a week. It should be fixed tomorrow. Sorry.)

UP - A pleasant surprise was that my tax return came in even higher than I was expecting. Despite my best efforts at accounting, I made a few snafus on my return, and as it turns out they worked in my favour. The extra grand that the federal government kindly gave me should come in handy considering the other side of my personal finance coin. Namely...

DOWN - What else? The stock market. Although my miniature diversification strategy has protected me a little in that not all of my investments have tanked by as much as my iShares international equity ETF has tanked for the past few weeks, I'm still hurting. I plan on sitting down and updating my net worth in the near future, to see how far away from my goal of $20,000 by the end of September I am. But off the top of my head? I'd guess I'm down at least $500 to $1000 in the last three weeks.

Ouch.