In annual tradition I list all of my investment holdings. This is a fairly static list as I only make a few trades per year and in some years have actually not made a single trade. That being said I did make a handful of trades earlier this year where I got rid of a few stocks (Starbucks, Brookfield Infrastructure Partners,Monday.com, and Crowdstrike) and all of that money plus some additional money went into Tesla.

Clearly I have had strong conviction about Tesla and it has rewarded me handsomely. That being said there is risk that it accounts for over 41% of my retirement nestegg. I am ok with this, but this is something that I plan to possibly mitigate as I completely stop working as the risk/reward profile probably doesn’t make sense as it will always be a volatile stock. I also already sold over 9% of my Tesla holdings in late December to fund a few years of my early retirement fund so as of right now I have 4 years of early retirement funds where I don’t need to worry about fluctuations in my portfolio as much.

Another item I added as 400 North which is a Commercial Real Estate property I bought 2 years ago to learn a little bit about real estate. I never included it before as I’ve never included real estate I own in any of my networth calculations as I don’t view real estate as something that is easy to sell or would be sold in many cases.

That being said after owning the property for 2 years me and my partners actually have it under contract to sell in a few months so I’ve included my initial investment amount in my retirement nestegg as it seems like we will make money on this property. It’s actually selling for an amount where I will make nearly 5x my initial investment, but for now to be safe I will leave it as if it’s only worth my initial investment as the deal could fall apart and I’m not sure I plan to use this money for my retirement nestegg. I will actually walk away with almost 9% of my nestegg in cash at closing before taxes, but I might roll that over via 1031 into another property so we’ll see how I decide to value it or not.

The smart thing would be to take that money and pay taxes on it and fund another 3 years of retirement, but I might continue to try to learn about real estate and purchase a property on my own that could be used for other ways in retirement.

Really at this point going forward I will probably no longer do much buying and slowly trim down the portfolio to keep my cash savings at 3-5 years of cash and trim down for various purchases. In fact this year alone we withdrew and SPENT 8% of our nestegg with some longer term projects (solar panels, vacation land, backyard patio, vehicles). This is almost shocking to type and is the hardest part about early retirement is that I’ve spent my entire working career saving money, buying investments, and living very frugally and now I’m to the point in my life where I need to start figuring out how to spend the money to bring me and my family the most enjoyment and it goes against every gut feeling I’ve acquired over the years that got me to where I am today. Selling great investments to spend the money has required some mental gymnastics on my part. I’ve always treated our investment accounts as one way roads where the money goes in and grows and almost feel like I’m breaking the law now that I’ve tapped into them for the first time in my life.