I had been seeing people post their networth percentage increase for 2012 and decided since I have the numbers to go back and see the change for the past 5 years. Below is the list.

2008 48.15%
2009 75%
2010 1471.43%
2011 30.32%
2012 63.78%

Honestly, I was a little shocked at the outcome. 2008-2009 was paying off debt, 2010 included an updated appraisal after lots of fixing up of the house (we refinanced an FHA loan 15 year to a conventional 15 year and dropped mortgage insurance and the interest rate as a result)but the real shockers for me were 2011 & 2012.

2011 is the year that I felt I was treading water, we made no progress except on things that were on autopilot due to limited income. My main challenge that year was keeping our heads above water. A 30% increase is pretty dramatic for a period where I just tried to keep us from falling further in the hole.

As a result 2012 was more spendy than normal. We had deferred some expenses and deferred our play money in 2011 so we cleaned that up in 2012. Nonetheless, we still increased our networth by about my income this year.

Out of curiousity I projected out 2013 and the minimum percentage increase is about 68%, well more than my expected salary and a lot closer to all of what my husband expects to make. That one was heart stopping for both of us. While we have always had a rule about being able to live on one person's income (preferably the smaller salary), this sort of drove home the fact that we do manage to do that.