My Financial Journey

Well the ridiculousness continues. An hour after I published my monthly report my portfolio gained another $30k plus to hit the $1.7M milestone. Cheers

Taxable Account Ally- $133,152.83
Taxable Fidelity – $5,418.79
Private Stock $72,000
Traditional Rollover IRA – $70,799.23
My Roth IRA – $546,259.52
Wife Roth IRA – $324,992.38
Wife 401k – $4,602.43
Traditional 401k – $544,780.32

Roth/Traditional % = 51.12% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $1,702,005.50
Retirement Salary (4%) $68,080.22

$100,000 NestEgg Milestones

Date	DOW Jones Value	MFJ Nestegg	Time to Achieve
Oct 2008	10,000	$ 69,300	29 years 2 months
Oct 2009	10,000 (+0%)	$100,000 (+44%)	30 years 2 months
Feb 2012	13,000 (+30%)	$200,000 (+100%)	2 years 5 months
Jul 2013	15,423 (+19%)	$300,000 (+50%)	1 years 5 months
Feb 2014	16,395.88 (+6.3%)	$400,000 (+33%)	7 months
April 2015	18,084.48 (+10.30%)	$500,000 (+25%)	1 year 2 months
August 2016	18,636.05 (+3.05%)	$600,000 (+20%)	1 year 4 months
January 2017	20,068.51 (+7.69%)	$700,000 (+17%)	5 months
June 2017	$21,182.53 (+5.56%)	$800,000 (+14%)	5 months
January 2018	$25,484.72(+20.31%)	$900,000 (+12.5%)	7 months
May 2018	$24,667.78(-3.21%)	$1,000,000 (+11.1%)	4 months
April 2019	$26,234.34 (+2.94%)	$1,100,000 (+10.0%)	11 months
December 2019	$28,331.20 (+7.99%)	$1,200,000 (+9.1%)	8 months
January 2020	$28,885.42(+1.96%)	$1,300,000 (+8.3%)	0 months 28 days
February 2020	$28,399.81(-1.68%)	$1,400,000 (+7.7%)	0 months 21 days
February 2020	$29,308.80(+3.20%)	$1,500,000 (+7.14%)	0 months 15 days
June 2020	$27,049.00(-7.71%)	$1,600,000 (+6.67%)	3 months 22 days
July 2020	$25,884.15(-4.31%)	$1,700,000 (+6.25%)	0 months 21 days

Well another nice month with the market being up 1.84% and my nestegg growing by 11.77%. Wait What?? This is getting ridiculous with my individual stocks returning 17.81% just this month and 68.31% in just the first 6 months of the year compared to SP 500 which is actually down 4.04% YTD for a market outperformance of 72% YTD!!

Just this month our nestegg grew by over $176,000 in a single month. Clearly this cannot and will not go on forever, but it also does not need to.

Individual stocks and outperformance of the market are not needed to retire early and were never part of the equation and still aren’t going forward. It was a risky experiment that I’ve dabbled in with a relatively small portion of my retirement nestegg savings and just turned out that I was incredibly lucky and that small portion of my nestegg savings has now grown to a ridiculous large number.

This is something that I will eventually pair back to more index funds, but right now the individual stocks driving the outperformance I believe have a long bright future so it will be tough for me to make this call. The good news is even if I am wrong I can afford to be wrong and still go on with life without any worries.

This is something that I don’t know what to call other than a margin of safety but there should be a cooler word for it. The 4% rule assumes you have a portfolio of 50% stock and bond index funds. I’ve always argued why not have 100% stock fund as it has higher returns over the long term and honestly the volatility is only relevant to you if you quit right at or close to your 4% number and have an immediate market correction. If you are well within a margin of safety above your 4% number say 30-50% higher then volatility is irrelevant and I would think the odds of your portfolio surviving and thriving long term are very close to 100%.

Same with these individual stocks – clearly no sane person would recommend putting a large portion of your retirement nestegg in a small basket of individual stocks that will be even more volatile and risky, but I’ve allowed myself to dabble with a small percentage of my portfolio and even if they all went to $0 I wouldn’t have ruined my retirement chances. The issue now is they are so large having grown so much that there is some risk to my portfolio and when we decide to live on our investments we will greatly pair back the individual stocks into index funds and use our time and energy into enjoy life vs having to do anything with our portfolio.

For the record I consider myself primarily lucky with a small percentage of skill in picking individual stocks and would recommend that anyone saving for retirement just put their money into VTSAX and not worry about anything else.

Fidelity Taxable – $5,261.33(+14.11%)
Taxable Account- $128,922.81(+18.64%)
Private Stock $72,000 (+0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $68,563.58 (+13.41%)
My Roth IRA – $531,548.40(+18.34%)
Wife Roth IRA – $315,723.19(+17.58%)
Wife 401k – $4,602.43(+1.96%)
Traditional 401k – $544,780.32(+3.29%)

Roth/(Traditional+Taxable) % = 50.69% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $1,671,402.06(+11.77%)
Retirement Salary (4%) $66,856

Monthly Contributions $1086.50(401k)
SP500 Performance +1.84%
My Monthly Investment Performance +11.70% (+7.14% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +17.81% (+15.97% vs SP500)

Well another $100k milestone. 2020 certainly has been a crazy year and just reinforces that no one in their wildest dreams can come remotely close to predicting what will happen to the economy/stock market and you are an absolute idiot if you think you can time the market. Stay invested with a long term focus and let time work in your favor.

The market was actually down about 7% since my last milestone, but my individual stock performance was able to outperform the market and bag another $100k milestone. These are getting less and less impressive as time goes on as my nestegg has grown large enough that only 6% increases will result in another $100k. This in theory could happen in the matter of only a few days. I think once we hit $2M it will require me to go to 250k increments as I honestly will not even be able to follow my portfolio close enough to catch the 100k jumps here pretty soon.

Taxable Account Ally- $122,303.15
Taxable Fidelity – $4,610.29
Private Stock $72,000
Traditional Rollover IRA – $61,873.31
My Roth IRA – $490,244.93
Wife Roth IRA – $286,854.80
Wife 401k – $4,757.59
Traditional 401k – $559,902.91

Roth/Traditional % = 48.49% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $1,602,546.98
Retirement Salary (4%) $64,101

$100,000 NestEgg Milestones

Date	DOW Jones Value	MFJ Nestegg	Time to Achieve
Oct 2008	10,000	$ 69,300	29 years 2 months
Oct 2009	10,000 (+0%)	$100,000 (+44%)	30 years 2 months
Feb 2012	13,000 (+30%)	$200,000 (+100%)	2 years 5 months
Jul 2013	15,423 (+19%)	$300,000 (+50%)	1 years 5 months
Feb 2014	16,395.88 (+6.3%)	$400,000 (+33%)	7 months
April 2015	18,084.48 (+10.30%)	$500,000 (+25%)	1 year 2 months
August 2016	18,636.05 (+3.05%)	$600,000 (+20%)	1 year 4 months
January 2017	20,068.51 (+7.69%)	$700,000 (+17%)	5 months
June 2017	$21,182.53 (+5.56%)	$800,000 (+14%)	5 months
January 2018	$25,484.72(+20.31%)	$900,000 (+12.5%)	7 months
May 2018	$24,667.78(-3.21%)	$1,000,000 (+11.1%)	4 months
April 2019	$26,234.34 (+2.94%)	$1,100,000 (+10.0%)	11 months
December 2019	$28,331.20 (+7.99%)	$1,200,000 (+9.1%)	8 months
January 2020	$28,885.42(+1.96%)	$1,300,000 (+8.3%)	0 months 28 days
February 2020	$28,399.81(-1.68%)	$1,400,000 (+7.7%)	0 months 21 days
February 2020	$29,308.80(+3.20%)	$1,500,000 (+7.14%)	0 months 15 days
June 2020	$27,049.00(-7.71%)	$1,600,000 (+6.67%)	3 months 22 days

Well another banner month for my retirement nestegg to finish at an all time monthly high after putting on another 95k. Year to date so far this has been my best investing year ever with my individual stock portfolio returning 42.36% YTD compared to the SP500 YTD total of -5.77% for an outperformance of over 48% YTD!!

In even more important news as June approaches I now enter my summer off time period from work where I take an unpaid absence off work to spend time with my family for the summer months! This is the whole point of everything on this blog and all of the steps I started taking over 15 years ago to give me the freedom to worry about the important things in life instead of money.

Fidelity Taxable – $4,610.92(+24.79%)
Taxable Account- $108,668.06(+6.07%)
Private Stock $72,000 (+0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $60,454.15 (+14.50%)
My Roth IRA – $449,181.40(+7.73%)
Wife Roth IRA – $268,514.01(+7.88%)
Wife 401k – $4,513.78(+4.74%)
Traditional 401k – $527,431.04(+5.63%)

Roth/(Traditional+Taxable) % = 47.99% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $1,495,373.36(+6.78%)
Retirement Salary (4%) $59,814

Monthly Contributions $1370.24(401k)
SP500 Performance +4.53%
My Monthly Investment Performance +6.68% (+2.15% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +8.00% (+3.47% vs SP500)

Wow what a month for my nestegg. Nearly $250,000 increase in a single month and my individual stock performance was tremendous returning nearly 30% for the month! All in all this gets me back to the beginning of February before the pandemic started – which is pretty amazing and totally unexpected and also represents an all-time month end high for my nestegg.

This totally reinforces that if you try to time the market you are an idiot. I’ve been actively investing for 16 years now and have been through financial crisis in 2008 and if you asked my opinion I would have said stocks for sure would have continued to fall and stagnate based on the repercussions of COVID and would have been very confident in that statement. The next logical thing you would think would be to pull the money out of the market and wait until things got better right? WRONG!!

No one can time the market and had I tried by using my experience and intellect I would have missed out on the best month of stock market gains in my lifetime that happened on absolutely no positive news. Trying to time the market is a fools errand and guarantees that you will never get anywhere near market returns much less outperform the market as I did this month by sitting there and just riding the storm.

Now do I think this is over and do I think that things will likely fall a significant amount yet again. You bet it seems entirely logical that the market will have a massive drop due to the havoc being wreaked throughout the world economy due to COVID and it doesn’t look like it’s going to end anytime soon. Will I do anything dumb based on that hunch? Nope 🙂

Here is some very relevant articles I wrote heading into the last great market crash

Why think you are smart enough to know where the market is going is so dangerous

Either the world is going to end or the market is going to recover

Fidelity Taxable – $3,694.94 (+23.77%)
Taxable Account- $102,453.40 (+32.75%)
Private Stock $72,000 (+0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $52,797.63 (+27.74%)
My Roth IRA – $416,946.43 (+31.51%)
Wife Roth IRA – $248,898.09 (+26.94%)
Wife 401k – $4,309.63 (+11.00%)
Traditional 401k – $499,302.81 (+12.71%)

Roth/Traditional % = 47.55% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $1,400,402.93 (+21.40%)
Retirement Salary (4%) $56,016

Monthly Contributions $3,480.62(401k) $500(Fidelity Taxable)
SP500 Performance +12.68%
My Monthly Investment Performance +21.06% (+8.38% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +29.92% (+17.24% vs SP500)