My Financial Journey

Well I got back some of the performance losses from last month and my retirement nestegg hit a new all-time high. My whole financial situation is still sort on hold as we look to buy some land so I am hesitant to make my Roth IRA contributions or increase my 401k until we know exactly what is going on with regards to a land purchase so this means my retirement nestegg is growing at a much slower pace than it should be and has been for the last couple of years.

I guess the good news is I did a lot of the work before I turned 30 so this situation isn’t going to ruin me financially I don’t think in the long term, but this land purchase or waiting to purchase sure is putting a crimp in my financial mojo.

I have for quite a while now had more than enough money in my checking account to pay off the mortgage on our existing house and the arbitrage between my mortgage rate and my checking account interest rate is not in my favor and at last count was costing me about $300 a month in interest and has been like I said for probably over a year now.

On top of that I have been scaling back our retirement account contributions all so I can put a huge pile of cash in the bank at one of the lowest interest rate times in US history. Bottom line don’t do what I am doing 🙂

Traditional Rollover IRA – $15,510.02 (6.51%)
My Roth IRA – $55,341.82(+5.75%)
Wife Roth IRA – $29,744.15 (+2.66%)
Traditional 401k – $113,394.22 (+3.06%)

Roth/Traditional % = 39.76% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $213,990.21 (+3.93%)

Monthly Contributions $1,072.92 (401k)
SPY Performance +2.56%
My Monthly Investment Performance +3.41% (+1.33%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +4.93% (+2.37%)

Well a pretty boring month overall for my nestegg, but what has to be one my worst months ever as far as investment performance vs the SP500. A number of my individual stocks got hit pretty hard this last earnings season and in general as I have grown to feel more comfortable I have been consolidating my stock investments more and more into a smaller set of companies so there is bound to be some more volatility with this approach, but I am hoping also better long term gains.

I still own a little under 50 individual stocks and no one stock makes up more than 5% of my portfolio so I am not exactly taking on unnecessary risk, but I am certainly less diversified than I was prior to this year.

I think it is a Buffet quote that goes something along the lines of “diversification is for people who don’t know what they are doing”. I guess we will find out 🙂 I feel more like I know what I am doing so I have become less diversified as a result and feel pretty good about some opportunities that are out there right now. I really wish we would make our land purchase sometime soon as I am hesitant to throw too much money in the market right now that we might potentially need for a house/land.

Traditional Rollover IRA – $14,562.63 (-9.46%)
My Roth IRA – $52,334.23 (-3.64%)
Wife Roth IRA – $28,973.19 (+0.64%)
Traditional 401k – $110,022.79 (+2.11%)

Roth/Traditional % = 40.16% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $205,892.84 (-0.50%)

Monthly Contributions $715.28 (401k)
SPY Performance +0.97%
My Monthly Investment Performance -0.85% (-1.82%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -3.34% (-4.31%)

Traditional Rollover IRA – $16,083.72 (+0.90%)
My Roth IRA – $54,310.82 (+1.71%)
Wife Roth IRA – $28,788.40 (+3.09%)
Traditional 401k – $107,748.14 (+3.93%)

Roth/Traditional % = 40.16% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $206,931.08 (+2.98%)

Monthly Contributions $715.28 (401k)
SPY Performance +3.64%
My Monthly Investment Performance +2.63% (-1.01%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +1.98% (-1.66%)

Well this was an exciting month and pretty good timing for me as with all of my recent contributions I have a good chunk of money to throw into individual stocks and went through most of the $10k I recently contributed this month.

I also made a pretty drastic strategy change with my 401k account. Doing these monthly reports have made me realize that my strategy of picking actively managed mutual funds trying to beat the SP500 just was not working over the longer term in my 401k and so I completely re-balanced my 401k where now the vast majority of my money is in a vanguard target retirement fund, another chunk is in a vanguard index fund, and I actually moved another chunk to a vanguard bond index fund since I thought we had been on a nice run up lately and wanted to have a more stable cash-like cushion should things turn south where I could then move it into the stock market if the opportunity presented itself. It’s not something I am contributing to on a regular basis and accounts for about 15% of my 401k right now.

Never invested in bonds before but should give me some stability in a downturn and allow me to do another re-balance to all stocks sometime in the future if we get another opportunity with a big downturn. Ironically this move allowed me to beat the SP500 this month in my 401k, but going forward it should track much closer to the SP500 in general. I will save my efforts for trying to beat the SP500 with my individual stock purchases in my IRA accounts where I have been much more successful over time.

Traditional Rollover IRA – $15,940.87 (-11.53%)
My Roth IRA – $53,396.64 (-7.77%)
Wife Roth IRA – $27,924.54 (-5.70%)
Traditional 401k – $103,675.68 (-4.95%)

Roth/Traditional % = 40.47% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $200,937.73 (-5.95%)

Monthly Contributions $715.28 (401k)
SPY Performance -5.92%
My Monthly Investment Performance -6.28% (-0.36%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -6.99% (-1.07%)

Well the good news is that my retirement nestegg grew again this month, the bad news is it was only because I contributed nearly $8,000 to my retirement accounts. That being said it felt good to max out my and my wife’s Roth IRAs again and give me some more cash to invest into the market. My performance overall and vs the SP500 was lacking this month, but that is to be expected on a short term period like a month.

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 month of nice growth for my retirement nestegg report. My first monthly report north of $200k and I cleared that hurdle by a good margin. Performance on a whole trailed the market some as my 401k performance as usual trailed and my individual stock as usual bested the SP500. It may be time for me to think about just moving all of my 401k money into a standard index fund and just worry about beating the market with individual stocks.

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%)