On another positive note I signed up a for a new service called SigFig which is a really cool service for tracking your investments and it makes me feel good because my percentages that I calculate in these monthly reports actually matched up with what SigFig calculated. It gave me great insight into my investment accounts and gives me a really clear picture about how my individual stock accounts have soundly trounced the SP500 and how my 401k has trailed it pretty miserably so it has me thinking I may at some point in the future just follow my own advice with mutual funds and stick all of my money in a vanguard target retirement index fund.

Traditional Rollover IRA – $18,018.35 (-5.34%)
My Roth IRA – $57,899.65 (+7.03%)
Wife Roth IRA – $29,611.21 (+2.77%)
Traditional 401k – $109,073.32 (+0.05%)

Roth/Traditional % = 40.96% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $213,640.35 (+1.76%)

Monthly Contributions $715.28 (401k) $2,000 (Wife Roth IRA) $5,000 (Jeremy Roth IRA)
SPY Performance -0.68%
My Monthly Investment Performance -1.91% (-1.23%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -3.33% (-2.65%)

Another exciting fact is that I made my first contribution to a Roth IRA since 2008! We had put this off as we were saving for a house/land, but our house savings has now hit a point where I think we have more than ample money for a purchase so now we will start amping up the retirement contributions again which is exciting for me as I need more money where I can buy stocks where I have been relatively successful thus far.

Traditional Rollover IRA – $18,018.35 (+3.48%)
My Roth IRA – $54,096.30 (+3.60%)
Wife Roth IRA – $28,812.16 (+13.68%)
Traditional 401k – $109,015.85 (+4.46%)

Roth/Traditional % = 39.49% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $209,942.66 (+5.32%)

Monthly Contributions $3,515.46 (401k) $3,000 (Wife Roth IRA)
SPY Performance +2.81%
My Monthly Investment Performance +2.05% (-0.76%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +3.02% (+0.21%)

Traditional Rollover IRA – $17,412.62 (+10.21%)
My Roth IRA – $52,221.31 (+3.61%)
Wife Roth IRA – $25,343.99 (+0.91%)
Current Traditional 401k – $104,361.29 (+10.43%)

Roth/Traditional % = 38.91% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $199,339.21 (+7.28%)

Monthly Contributions $6,089.78 (401k)
SPY Performance +4.31%
My Monthly Investment Performance +4.00% (-0.31%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +4.01% (-0.30%)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $200,487.68

Fell kind of dorky doing this 2 days before the end of the month but wanted to celebrate a mini milestone the day after it happened. Just 28 months ago I wrote my post celebrating that I had broken 6 figures for the first time and as of yesterday I broke $200,000 for the first time.

A couple things to point out. Just a little over three years ago the market was in turmoil and my retirement nestegg had dropped nearly in half. Everything was doom and gloom and even the most ardent long term financial advisers were second guessing the stock market. I kept my cool and stuck with my plan and now have a nestegg that has nearly quadrupled from lows just 3 years ago.

I started investing in 2004 and it took me about 5 years to grow my nestegg to $100k. It took me less than half that time to grow my next $100k, which is starting to show the power of compound interest. No longer am I doing the majority of the heavy lifting with my saving and contributions, now I have the ball rolling downhill and my money is making me money – which is such an awesome thing. Now yes the market has been going gangbusters the last three years, but its still pretty obvious that the longer you are invested the easier it is to make money. Compound interest it is your friend.

When I wrote my breaking $100k post 28 months ago the DOW had just broken through the 10,000 mark for the first time in a year. So exactly 1 year before I broke through $100k the DOW was at 10,000 and my Retirement Nestegg Report was at $69,300. 1 year later my nestegg was at $100,000 and the DOW was still at 10,000. Now 28 months later the DOW is up 30% to 13,000 and my retirement nestegg is up 100% to 200,000. So in the last 40 months the DOW has grown by 30% and my retirement nestegg has grown by 189%. Which means I am doing something right with my investments – which supercharges the compound interest power.

Kind of related to that previous point but I have been doing an absolutely crappy job saving for my retirement the last three years. I contribute the bare minimum to my 401k to get full matching and have not contributed a penny more to my 401k or our Roth IRAs. Instead we have been aggressively saving to purchase a large parcel of land out in the country and build a house. In fact our house/land savings has surpassed our existing $120k mortgage and is growing at a good rate each month.

One thing I have said in the past is I absolutely wanted to concentrate on saving for our retirement as absolutely soon as possible after I got my first job and to completely ignore other things such as our kids college savings. I knew how important it was for us to get our retirement savings on the right track to take advantage of compound interest and always said once I was sure that was on the right track I could worry about those other things such as kids savings in the future – I think the exact quote was “I could just turn my income spigot at their college education if I so chose.”

Well we aren’t worrying so much about the college savings yet but I did move the “income spigot” towards our house savings and was able to save a large amount of money in a short time and I have not seriously set back our retirement goals because I already got that ball rolling. You can never make up the lost time when savings for retirement and those first chunk of years are so vitally important when it comes to the power/value it gives you in compounding that if you just take care of that right away its really hard to mess things up in the future if you do something dumb like save for an extravagant house or your kids college education.

Anyway I hope to be here less than 28 months from now to celebrate hitting $400k and hopefully will be writing this from our dream house out in the country.

As I’ve mentioned earlier I really don’t track my stocks or my portfolios that closely and I really only do these monthly reports for my own benefit so I can look back at periods like 2008-09 or the end of 2011 where things may have looked so doom and gloom and be able to take that data point and pull it out into a longer term view and show just how trivial those movements are in the long term and how there is no reason to get excited over these short term fluctuations. I don’t alter or judge my investment strategy just because it performs poorly for a few months or a year or two. I look at the larger picture and tune out all of the short term noise and look at where I want to be 20 years down the road and what investments are going to take me there.

Anyway here is my monthly report.

Traditional Rollover IRA – $15,799.88 (+7.23%)
My Roth IRA – $50,401.28 (+11.97%)
Wife Roth IRA – $25,116.39 (+13.75%)
Current Traditional 401k – $94,502.14 (+6.60%)

Roth/Traditional % = 40.64% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $185,819.69 (+9.00%)

Monthly Contributions $699.08 (401k)
SPY Performance +4.64%
My Monthly Investment Performance +8.59% (+3.95%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +11.60% (+6.96%)

Another observation is that I only contributed $16,782 to my retirement nestegg this year and even a bulk of that came from vested employer matching contributions. This is the lowest amount I have contributed to my retirement nestegg since 2005. The reason for this is I am currently saving a boatload of money for our next house and have been putting all of our excess cash flow towards this endevour. Heading into 2012 this is something I will have to reconsider as my house savings account is now at what I think is a pretty sufficient amount.

Overall my retirement nestegg shrunk by over 1% in 2011, but as I pointed out above I don’t have any worries that I am on the wrong path or employing the wrong methodology. The stock market gyrates back and forth in the short term, but long term I like the trend that I am seeing.

Anyway here is my monthly and annual report

Traditional Rollover IRA – $14,731.10 (-0.97%)
My Roth IRA – $45,012.64 (-3.40%)
Wife Roth IRA – $22,080.12 (-0.23%)
Current Traditional 401k – $88,653.17 (-0.18%)

Roth/Traditional % = 39.36 % (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $170,477.03 (-1.13% 1 month) (+4.78% 1 year)

Monthly Contributions $693.10 (401k)
SPY Performance +0.31%
My Monthly Investment Performance -1.53% (-1.84%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -2.14% (-2.45%)

My Contributions for 2011 $16,782.97
SPY Performance for 2011 -0.18%
Investment Performance for 2011 -5.53 (-5.35%)
Individual Stock Performance for 2010 -2.29% (-2.47%)
Total Investment Return -$9,000.84

Traditional Rollover IRA – $14,875.70 (-2.14%)
My Roth IRA – $46,604.10 (-2.80%)
Wife Roth IRA – $22,131.60 (+2.42%)
Current Traditional 401k – $88,818.48 (-0.47%)

Roth/Traditional % = 39.86 % (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $172,429.88 (-0.89%)

Monthly Contributions $693.10 (401k)
SPY Performance -0.27%
My Monthly Investment Performance -1.29% (-1.02%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -1.34% (-1.07%)

Traditional Rollover IRA – $15,201.22 (+15.08%)
My Roth IRA – $47,947.32 (+6.71%)
Wife Roth IRA – $21,609.15 (+11.21%)
Current Traditional 401k – $89,233.16 (+11.13%)

Roth/Traditional % = 39.98 % (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $173,980.85 (+10.21%)

Monthly Contributions $693.10 (401k)
SPY Performance +10.92%
My Monthly Investment Performance +9.77% (-1.15%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +9.25% (-1.67%)

The good news I think is that I believe I have come a somewhat seasoned investor and having my largest single stock investment fall by 62% in a few short months and my overall retirement nestegg fall by nearly 20% from its all time high in April really gets no other reaction out of me other than a slight chuckle and some excitement that I might get the chance to make some very attractive investments in the next few months. I still very much feel like I am on the exact right track and I have kind of dealt with a somewhat worst case scenario (not saying thing won’t go lower), but things are sort of hitting the fan again in the market, my largest stock holding by far gets cut in half in a single month, and my retirement nestegg is still $100k larger than it was the last time things went to pot just a little over two years ago.

Also while Netflix was my largest stock holding it never really accounted for much more than 10% of my individual stock portfolio and maybe roughly 5-6% of my overall retirement nestegg so while I certainly felt things it didn’t permanently wreck my portfolio which I think is a good experience to go through and now going forward I will have a better understanding of how to handle diversification. And while it sucks to be down 60%+ on a stock in just 2 months its hard to get too upset when I’m still up nearly 450% on all of my Netflix investments and I personally feel the sky is not falling and Netflix still has a lot going for it and will very likely be a good performer moving forward.

So as to what I am going to do – I will probably follow the market a little closer than I did when it was constantly going up and will look to contribute more funds as the market is falling. I do have a stash of about $10k in cash in my 401k account kind of waiting for an opportunity like this and well I may put my house/land savings on hold if the market presents me with some attractive prices as I currently have $112k saved up for our next house so feel I can probably start diverting more money back towards our retirement nestegg going forward and still have the flexibility to jump on a land purchase if it presents itself. Overall with the worsening stock market and worsening real estate market I feel like I have put myself in real good shape over the last 5+ years to put myself in an even better position 5+ years from now.

Traditional Rollover IRA – $13,209.23 (-8.80%)
My Roth IRA – $44,930.66 (-10.54%)
Wife Roth IRA – $19,431.03 (-20.60%)
Current Traditional 401k – $80,286.67 (7.93%)

Roth/Traditional % = 40.77 % (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $157,857.59 (-10.50%)

Monthly Contributions $693.10 (401k)
SPY Performance -7.42%
My Monthly Investment Performance -10.90% (-3.48%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -13.02% (-5.60%)

But anyway I will say it again I’m very glad I started tracking my performance against the SP500 as even in a down month like this where most people would be like oh crap my accounts shrunk by $11,000 – life sucks. I can be like awesome I beat the market by well over 1% again just this month. Certainly gives you a different perspective on things even though you shouldn’t even be looking at things in such a short period of time – it makes me feel good and makes me feel like I’m making progress and is 7 months in a row my performance has bested the SP500.

Here is my report

Traditional Rollover IRA – $14,485.30 (-4.44%)
My Roth IRA – $50,224.67 (-4.80%)
Wife Roth IRA – $24,469.87 (-9.48%)
Current Traditional 401k – $87,206.08 (-6.48%)

Roth/Traditional % = 42.47 % (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $176,385.92 (-6.27%)

Monthly Contributions $693.10 (401k)
SPY Performance -7.79%
My Monthly Investment Performance -6.64% (+1.15%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -6.08% (+1.71%)