<prompt> Human: So Ive been collecting data in mint for quite some timeabout 4.5 years. Ive done my best to keep the transactions recorded properly. The link contains a graph of income, expense and net income with a corresponding trend line. When you initially look at this thing it looks pretty ugly... Which is what I thought when I pulled the data and visualized it. Income going up; good, expenses going up; bad and net going down; bad. So let me give you a little perspective to go with this. We went from making about 85k combined to about 150k combined in this time period. Wait what?!? Well you have to realize mint shows paychecks coming in net of deductions. So what does this mean? Well it means we have a dependent care FSA of 5k yearly, HSA of 2600. We have pre-tax health of of 4k. Our 401k contributions have gone from 8 of 85k to about 17 of 150k. So basically more and more of our increases are coming out pre-tax reducing our tax liabilities and building equity. Net worth has gone from 34k to 330K. We bought one house lived in it for 3 years and made it a rental and bought a 2nd house. Expenses have gone up due to 2 mortgages. Income has also gone up bc of rental income. As time has gone by we are bringing home less tax inefficient money and trading it for tax efficient equity. As your tax rate increases putting cash in the bank costs us about 25-30 to just bring it into the household. I would much rather stuff that in retirement accounts or HSA or 529s. I am a CPA no longer in public practice and Im in my early 30s.Questions?EDIT: To the dissatisfied. My apologies for leaving you hanging... My point, and it was not explicit, was that I was surprised that my net income has actually been going steadily down as my net worth has been on an aggressive upward trend. It would seem logical that if your income doubled your net would go up but Ive been pretty aggressive in using deferred tax strategies to bring that number down. If you just look at your net income there is a very large gaping hole that is missing from that picture. Most people dont just look at their income statement they also consider their balance sheet. It is those two statements that paints a picture. The data in mint can be very useful but a narrative is also important to tell the whole story. EDIT: followup posted  <response>: So you wanted to make a post about your net worth increasing, and to accomany that, you showed a graph that is completely irrelevant and, if anything, paints a much different picture from what your actual intended point is?So confused. 