Goodbye 2025, hello 2026! 🎆 It definitely took me by surprise when I realized I hadn’t made a single update all year. I honestly almost forgot the steps to creating a new post. That said, I won’t make excuses, I truly just didn’t have much to write or update about this year.

Still, I know future-me would regret it if I didn’t at least attempt to summarize my 2025, especially if I ever want to look back. So… here I am.

Where do I even start? Well, I’m in a very comfortable place in life. If I’m being completely honest, it’s a bit of a boring phase, but in a good, calm, relaxed way. As a single, child-free woman who works from home, I actually have quite a bit of free time. I’m still figuring things out, especially after spending my teenage years and my 20s hustling nonstop. It’s kind of wild for me to slow down and simply enjoy life.

At times, it feels like I’m living multiple lives and can’t quite decide which one I want. On one side, I’m attending weddings and baby showers, surrounded by friends building their own families, and thinking maybe I should be settling down. On another side, I’m perfectly content at home, picking up random hobbies, building LEGO sets, and watching Netflix in the comfort of my own space. And on an entirely different side, I’m still enjoying going out, whether that’s drinking, traveling, or just having a night out on the town.

Reconciling all of these wants is hard without feeling selfish. At the same time, I don’t want to settle simply to meet societal expectations. I genuinely enjoy my time alone and feel happy and fulfilled with the connections I have right now.

Moving on… without further ado, I’ll switch things up this year and start with some surprising numbers before diving into a few highlights from the year.

Net Worth

December 2025 Net Worth: $772,837

Year-to-Date Change: + $201,326

For the first time in my life, my net worth increased by over $200k in a single year! I received a 10% increase in pay from a combination of merit raises and bonus compensation, which definitely helped. Still, this growth genuinely surprised me. I actually invested less this year (more on that in the next section), and I also took a two-week vacation to one of the most expensive countries in the world. All things considered, this feels like a huge milestone and a reminder of how far I’ve come since reaching my first $100k net worth.

Personal Capital or whatever the platform is now called hasn’t been the best lately. I haven’t been able to update my HSA account for over 9 months now so my balance is actually off by about $4,000 but to keep things consistent, I’ll go based on the number on my net worth screenshot. The random dip at the beginning of the year was also some kind of glitch where my account wasn’t updating.

Spending

Over the last two years, I was pretty shocked by how much my spending increased especially after becoming a homeowner. However, my spending has remained fairly consistent these past few years, hovering around $70k annually. At this point, the shock has worn off, and I’ve made peace with this being my new normal. While putting this recap together, I realized my spending breakdown is almost identical to last year so feel free to check out that post if you want a more detailed breakdown.

A mini outline of this year’s spending:

• $45k went towards homeownership (mortgage, HOA fees, and property taxes). 

• $7.5k went towards travel which just like last year is my second highest category of spending.

• My remaining spending came out to a little less than last year’s at approximately $16.5k.

This is all pretty comparable to last year (deja-vu, I tell you) which really makes sense as I felt like 2025 was really just an extension of 2024 with no drastic changes.

Investment

In 2025, I contributed $55k across all my investment accounts (401k, Roth IRA, HSA, and brokerage). That’s about $7k less than last year, which was a bit disappointing. Honestly, the year just got away from me, and I wasn’t as consistent with contributions, especially during the travel-heavy second half of the year.

The good news? My investment gains were still higher than last year, thanks to a $103k market gain, about $10k more than 2024. On top of that, I received $12k from my employer through a 401k match and HSA contributions.

It’s just crazy to wrap my head around the idea that I made six-figures doing absolutely nothing except parking my money in investment accounts. And it just shows how early investment makes such a big difference. I contributed less this year but still made out more from the market thanks to all my past investments.

Travel

I’m happy to announce that I think my travel revenge era is over. I “only” did two international trips this year and these were actually the only trips I took the whole year other than minor road trips less than 2-3 hours away. I did not time it properly though as they both came at the latter half of the year which meant I was pretty bored for the first half of the year. I’ll have to plan a little better for 2026.

This year, I went to one of the most expensive countries to visit, Iceland. But so worth it! I was able to cross off my bucket list item of seeing the northern lights which I had failed to see on last year’s trip to Alaska. 

We did a two-week road trip around the Ring Road, saw countless waterfalls, even walked behind and under them. We had multiple nights of aurora sighting, the most memorable one for me being when we stayed at a bubble igloo and was able to watch the aurora from the comfort of the bed!

At the end of the year, I also went to Taiwan and Thailand for 18 days including travel time which is my longest trip yet! I arrived a few days earlier than my friend I was meeting up with so for about a day and a half I experienced some solo-traveling. I’m glad to get it out of my system because I realized solo traveling isn’t truly for me. I was missing the social interaction when I was visiting places on my own, so may consider joining group trip next year!

2025 Goals Review

Time to review the goals I set at the beginning of 2025. I only made 2 goals for the year and unfortunately it’s a 50-50 split between pass and fail.

1. Hit $700k net worth. I’m not quite as optimistic on the market for 2025 after two amazing years of 20+% returns. I’m hoping now that my nest egg is at $500k, even with a less than stellar market returns, I can still see some gains.

Success and surpassed! I really have to thank past-me for putting in the work that allowed me invest less this year, but still allow for gains. Well, that and of course another good market return this year.

2. Run 5k in 30 minutes. While I know many people have running a marathon as their goal, I honestly have no intention of subjecting myself to that much training as I know I will burn out. I do, however, want to be able to run more casually but at a decent enough pace. I want to increase my fitness enough to be able to hit a 10-minute mile routinely and eventually hit a 5k in 30 minutes.

Unfortunately this was a fail. I did get a good start into 2025 and even went back on my no marathon goal. I decided to go for a half-marathon in the spring but went too hard, too soon. I started on a plan that I now realize was too aggressive. I failed to take breaks for fear of losing progress when I started feeling that my achilles didn’t feel quite right and ended up getting achilles tendonitis which by nature takes a little long to fully heal. While I did PT, I lost confidence and was also nervous about making things worse so I stopped running for most of the year. I guess the somewhat passing goal is that I did hit my 10-minute mile goal but had to stop before hitting the 5k goal.

2026 Goals

This is going to sound boring and repetitive, but true to the theme of this year, I will keep my goals relatively the same for 2026.

1. Hit $900k net worth. While I would love to hit the million dollar club, I think $900k is the more realistic goal to hit and I’d like to not set the year up with a failure or feel like I have to hold off on spending on experiences just to hit some arbitrary number. But hey, a girl can dream, so I’ll put it out there that the $1 million is definitely on my radar!
   
   
2. Run more consistently. A part of me thinks I should just give up on this running thing after all my setbacks. But I really think at some point in my life I would really like to run a half marathon so why not this year? I’ll definitely train more conservatively this time around but at the same time I really don’t want to pressure myself into it. Rather, I’d like to just create a better running habit so that if I do decide to ramp up to a half marathon, it won’t be a huge overhaul from my baseline if I’ve been running consistently.
   
   
3. Learn Chinese. I can count this one half a success already because at the time of this writing, I’ve actually signed up for a Mandarin language class through my local university. It’ll be an online live session and the first time I’ll be back in school in almost ten years! I tried Duolingo over the years and it hasn’t been sticking. It worked really well for Spanish because I had a 4-year high school Spanish foundation to build upon so I’m hoping to build some foundation through a live class with Mandarin first before continuing on my own.
   

On that note, cheers to 2026!