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Month: July 2013

Interim Retirement Nestegg Report – I broke $300,000

Interim Retirement Nestegg Report – I broke $300,000

Taxable Account – $2,022.45
Traditional Rollover IRA – $21,071.82
My Roth IRA – $80,604.97
Wife Roth IRA – $46,118.18 149,817.42
Traditional 401k – $152,115.57

Total Retirement Nestegg – $301,932.99

Well seems like it wasn’t that long ago when I broke $200,000 and well it wasn’t. Just 16.5 months ago I broke the $200k barrier and 28 months before that I broke the $100k barrier and 5 years before that I got started investing. This is a pretty vivid example of the power of compound interest. The ball is rolling and most of the heavy lifting was done on my part by setting that initial goal to have contributed $100k to my retirement accounts by the time I reached age 30. It is also worth noting that in only 8 trading days this month my nestegg grew by over $15k.

Now even though I have been slacking by my standards as far as contributing more money to my retirement accounts – it really doesn’t matter as much as it used to and like I always said I can just sit back and watch and turn the spigot to other plans/goals (house savings, kids college, etc) and really I have been able to exactly that and really not miss a beat. Funny I am only 33 but 30 seems like such a long time ago 🙂

Also from a performance comparison its neat to see the various milestones compared to an index at the time.

Date DOW Jones Value MFJ Nestegg
Oct 2008 10,000 $ 69,300
Oct 2009 10,000 (+0%) $100,000 (+44%)
Feb 2012 13,000 (+30%) $200,000 (+100%)
Jul 2013 15,423 (+19%) $300,000 (+50%)

In other milestone related news I am celebrating my 10 year wedding anniversary today. I’ve been blessed with a beautiful caring wife and four great little kids over the last 10 years and I’ve got to say I don’t think things could have turned out any better for me and I am truly grateful for all I have been blessed with. The financial stuff is great, but in the end it means nothing without my family.

I hope to see you again shortly (12 months at this pace?) for my interim $400k post.

Retirement Nestegg Report – June 2013

Retirement Nestegg Report – June 2013

Well after last month’s huge increase gave a little bit back this month. Overall I trailed the market, but my individual stocks beat the market again this month. Not sure how my 401k did so bad as it is nearly entirely in index funds and actually has larger cash cushion so the market going down I expected some out performance, but it’s only one month and probably some sort of anomaly. I am still in a rough situation as I have an extremely large cash cushion for purchasing land and a house and the land search is going very badly, so I have historically low mortgage interest rates finally starting to go up, the market is at all-time highs, interest rates on cash are non-existent, and my retirement savings is in limbo because of all of these unknowns.

It’s tough for me because its easy for me when I know what I want to accomplish (such as saving $100k by age 30) or amassing a down payment fund for next house that is larger than what we paid for the house we are currently living in, but now I am in limbo. Afraid to ramp up retirement savings because don’t want to hurt house/land chances, yet I have nothing to do with this huge wad of cash and every month I watch money flowing out of my net worth as I let my existing mortgage continue to live and have nearly $200k in cash sitting on the sidelines that had I continue to invest over the last 3-4 years like normal would probably be worth over half a million dollars.

Taxable Account – $2,013.20 (0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $19,757.38 (-1.10%)
My Roth IRA – $75,764.97 (-0.64%)
Wife Roth IRA – $43,090.51 -1.99%)
Traditional 401k – $145,957.99 (-3.01%)

Roth/Traditional % = 41.47% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $286,584.05 (-2.09%)

Monthly Contributions $736.74 (401k)
SPY Performance -1.50%
My Monthly Investment Performance -2.09% (-0.59%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -1.11% (+0.39%)