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My All Time Investment Performance January 2022

My All Time Investment Performance January 2022

Well time keeps flying by and somehow these ridiculous numbers keep getting better and better each year. I am fully aware that one bad year which we are probably due for can and will greatly reduce these returns and I do feel like I am more lucky than I am skilled, but I now have 16 years of returns and have beat the SP500 10 of 16 years and my stocks have over double the annualized returns of the SP500 over the same period of time.

Doubling the annualized performance sounds cool and all, but if you stretch that over 16 years you see the absolute insane impact of doing that has over the long term. Over the last 16 years every dollar that I put into individual stocks has turned into $25.20 where as had I just only invested in an index fund would be worth $3.51 which is over 7x the amount of returns. The longer this continues and the bigger the numbers get the more exaggerated this will become.

Like I mentioned above I am not sure what to think of this. I feel like I have been EXTREMELY lucky and just a couple different decisions would have drastically changed the outcome of this experiment. I do think I have a certain knack for see what changes are coming in the world and having the conviction to stick to my intuitions even when everyone around me is calling me an idiot for talking about electric cars or streaming internet video. That being said I am well aware that none of the things that I was convinced about were necessarily a lock to become reality and Tesla could have gone bankrupt a couple of different times and Netflix could have been taken out by a competitor.

I am now to a point in my life where I need to make some decisions on whether to put it into cruise control and just ride the market averages or do I have a big enough cushion of excess money where I can continue to take calculated risks and if they blow up in my face I am still going to be perfectly ok. Ultimately I think the longer time goes I will probably fall into the latter camp of continuing to take calculated risks knowing that I can survive a few mistakes without meaningfully blowing up my future plans in life. I still have 40% of my nestegg invested in Tesla stock which is a very polarizing, speculative, and volatile company, but I strongly believe in the mission and the leader so this is one of those calculated risks. I don’t see it happening, but even if Tesla were to go to $0 I would still be in a very good situation.

This ability to have this huge cushion of money that is a big safety net is allowing me to take on some additional risks. I finally toyed with crypto this year and put $500 in to learn and fully expected to lose all $500. That $500 has now turned into a few hundred thousand dollars and I actually now am doing some side work in the crypto space for one of the top people in the industry. I also yesterday decided to take the plunge into real estate and put an offer in on some land to build a self storage facility with another friend who is a real estate investor.

For someone who had no experience in crypto and no experience in real estate these types of moves would be terrifying and honestly something I probably would have never done if I didn’t have the huge safety net of a nestegg. It’s allowing me to just explore and learn new things and new areas that ultimately very well could each result in even more money, safety, and ultimately freedom to use the rest of my life to continually explore and do things that I will truly enjoy or are interested in.

I still have my day job for now that pays me extremely well and gives me my summer months off and provides me with 7 weeks of vacation, but as time goes on and these other numbers continue to grow and other opportunities continue to blossom it probably does not make any financial sense for me to keep my day job anymore which is kind of a crazy thing. Not so much that I do not need to work any longer to provide for my family, just that I am probably costing myself money by using my time and effort at my day job. I know this is always the toughest thing for every FIRE person to do come to the realization of, especially when my current job 99.999% of people would kill for. Working 9 months year with an additional 7 weeks of vacation, crazy 401k matching, bonus, relaxed work from home schedule, etc and at the end of the day a point is coming here likely soon where I will say no thanks and this is coming from a guy with 5 young children to care for and put through college.

It’s definitely a major mind shift that is so hard to do when you spent your entire life finding ways to earn and save money and get a great job with great benefits and constantly hoarding away money for the future and now that future is here and to be perfectly honest its a lot scarier than I thought it would be. Turning off the spigot of cash and perceived security of a stable day job might honestly might be one of the hardest things I will do even though I know deep down I will look back and think you idiot you should have done that much earlier!! I think this is where the side work and the real estate investments will maybe finally push me over the edge where I feel confident enough that I’m not in any way hampering my or my families future by turning off the spigot of money from the day job.

Anyway long post as I don’t get out here as often as I used to and the end of the year is where I reflect and contemplate my life more. It’s been an awesome journey so far and I am genuinely excited for the next phases of my life. This blog has been invaluable to me and I honestly learn so much myself just by going back and reading older posts. Everything has gone better than I could have ever dreamt and now I just need to finish up the final few chapters of this journey.

Crazy stupid investing results below

MFJ Returns By Year

YearSP500MFJ NesteggMFJ StocksMFJ Investment GainsBeat SP500
200615.79%14.37%14.20%$3,603.49N
20075.49%5.50%7.25%$2,576.67Y
2008-37.00%-47.98%-37.00%-$35,108.72N
200926.46%32.75%35.78%$22,455.55Y
201015.06%24.60%36.94%$32,127.00Y
20112.11%-5.53%-2.29%-$7,615.64N
201216.00%18.12%10.25%$23,895.25N
201332.39%50.20%68.58%$114,752.78Y
201413.69%8.91%7.91%$35,262.52N
20151.38%7.34%14.34%$32,684.08Y
20169.54%3.32%-4.57%$144,806.16N
201718.42%23.31%27.49%$187,079.40Y
2018-6.24%4.56%15.60%$41,237.23Y
201928.72%32.46%37.07%$292,366.43Y
202016.26%117.02%218.49%$1,481,868.23Y
202122.61%30.45%32.74%$864,774.86Y

MFJ Cumulative Returns By Year

YearSP500MFJ NesteggMFJ Stocks
200615.79%14.37%14.20%
200722.15%20.66%22.48%
2008-23.05%-37.23%-22.84%
2009-2.69%-16.68%4.77%
201011.97%3.82%43.47%
201114.33%-1.92%40.19%
201232.63%15.85%54.56%
201375.58%74.01%160.55%
201499.62%89.51%181.16%
2015102.37%103.42%221.48%
2016121.68%110.18%206.79%
2017162.52%159.17%291.12%
2018146.13%170.99%352.14%
2019216.82%258.95%519.75%
2020268.34%679.00%1873.83%
2021351.62%916.20%2520.07%

Annualized Returns since 2006

SP500 +9.88%
MFJ Nestegg +15.60%
MFJ Stocks +22.65%

My Best and Worst Stocks in 2022

My Best and Worst Stocks in 2022

In annual tradition I will list my best and worst individual stock performers for 2021.

Ethereum +407.64%
Moderna +143.11%
DataDog +80.93%
Cloudflare +73.05%
Microsoft +51.21%
Costco +50.67%
Tesla +49.76%
Apple +33.82%
Intuitive Surgical +31.76%

So one thing that probably pops out that I have now delved into the crypto sphere and while Ethereum is up 407% this year I am actually up much more as I put a trivial amount of money in at the beginning of the year to learn about it and have somehow managed that everything I bought with it has gone up a ridiculous amount and I am up like 600x my initial investment which was just a few hundred dollars. I still consider this entirely speculative and educational and would not be surprised to have all of it go to $0 as a chunk of it is in ETH, but also have some NFTs that in theory one could currently sell for a few hundred thousand

Not quite as crazy of a year as last year, but still some very strong performers and Tesla was up 50% which really makes a large impact on my portfolio.

Zoom -45.48%
Fubo TV -44.57
Arcimoto -41.19%
Twilio -22.20%
Crowdstrike -3.34%

Regarding my biggest losers most of these are very small allocations in my portfolio and were very speculative in nature when purchased other than Crowdstrike. I will continue to hold and see what happens long term.

Retirement Nestegg Report December 2020

Retirement Nestegg Report December 2020

Oof. Wow what a year. I don’t even know how to put into words how crazy this year was. Obviously everything going on with a global pandemic and all of the horrible things that everyone has had to deal with this year has been at the forefront of everything 2020. One would logically think that 2020 would have been a horrible year to be an investor and once the pandemic hit I would have agreed 100% with that statement and I’m not sure many experts would have disagreed either.

Fortunately this is now not my first rodeo and I have experience of the benefit of doing absolutely nothing and this year it paid off in spades. My retirement nestegg over doubled ending the year up 117%. This was driven in a very large part by my individual stock portfolios which ended the year up 218%, which was driven in large part by the meteoric stock rise of Tesla which was by far my largest holding.

Our investment gains for 2020 were just short of $1.5 million. To put that in perspective all of my investment gains for the prior 14 years were only $890k and well my entire nestegg was only worth $1.2M going into this year. That’s the power of compounding in full force and well obviously our returns supercharged everything.

I will be the first to admit that I am extremely lucky. I have hit some massive homeruns with some of the best individual stock performers in the last 20 years (Netflix, Amazon, Tesla). My Tesla position now makes up $1M of my portfolio and that amount very well could be $0 as Tesla could have gone bankrupt. I definitely took some small educated risks over my career and some of them have paid off handsomely.

The thing is I didn’t need to be lucky. I didn’t need to take risks. Simply living below my means and putting my money in index funds has resulted in me having a sizeable nestegg that gives me tons of future freedom. I have contributed significantly more to my index funds and I started very early in this journey. This gave me the freedom to take some risks without really risking anything at all. If everything blew up in my face with my individual stock portfolio I was still going to be very ok and still on track for an early retirement. I already had my pile of F-you money. This gave me the freedom to take risks with parts of my portfolio and with my career choices.

F-you money money opens up so many new doors for you and I highly suggest you start accumilating your own pile of F-you money.

This now marks 15 straight years that I have published my retirement nestegg report. In that time it has grown from $24,616 to today’s total of $2,761.505. This has been incredibly valuable to me as I tracked my progress against my financial goals. Going forward this number really doesn’t mean much to me anymore and I really don’t have much more to accomplish. In that respect I’ve made the decision to stop publishing my monthly reports going forward.

I proved my point that by simply living frugally and investing for the long term over a period of 1 or 2 decades will result in more money than you could ever need. It wasn’t complicated. You didn’t need to win the lottery. You didn’t need to be a professional athlete. Just spend less than you earn, invest it, and let time work its magic.

Fidelity Taxable – $6,025.88(+10.24%)
Taxable Account- $331,736.27(+20.49%)
Private Stock $82,500(+0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $116,164.46(+16.30%)
My Roth IRA – $1,010,837.95(+15.35%)
Wife Roth IRA – $531,398.11(+9.38%)
Wife 401k – $5,577.30(+2.69%)
Traditional 401k – $677,265.58(+4.69%)

Roth/(Traditional+Taxable) % = 55.85% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $2,761,505.55(+11.45%)
Retirement Salary (4%) $110,460

Monthly Contributions $933.84(401k)
SP500 Performance +3.71%
My Monthly Investment Performance +11.42% (+7.71% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +14.55% (+10.84% vs SP500)

My retirement contributions for 2020 $31,376.37
401k $7,174.31
401k matching $12,302.06
My Roth IRA $0
Wife Roth IRA $0
Taxable Account $$11,900.00
Wife Retirement Account ??


SP500 Performance for 2020 +16.26%
Investment Performance for 2020 +117.02% (+100.76% vs SP500)
Individual Stock Performance for 2020 +218.49% (+202.23% vs SP500)
Total Investment Return 2020 +$1,481,868.23

Retirement Nestegg Report November 2020

Retirement Nestegg Report November 2020

Well another all time record high for our nestegg and near all-time high for gains and percentage. It’s bonkers that a gain of $430k and 21% in a single month is not an all-time record, but no just a few months ago in August the increases were even higher. As usual a large percent of these gains were driven by the performance of Tesla stock though the market has a whole had an impressive 10.76% gain now that the election is behind us. What’s even more impressive is I wasn’t even aware that the gains this month were anything special until I did this report. Looks like yesterday was a down day so I likely surpassed the $2.5M milestone yesterday – which equates to $100k forever retirement income which is more money than we will ever need.

Going forward I just need to come up with a better plan on how I can access any of this money over the next 20 years and start dialing back the amount of time we spend working.

Fidelity Taxable – $5,466.09(+6.81%)
Taxable Account- $275,325.93(+36.09%)
Private Stock $82,500(+0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $99,887.68(+28.91%)
My Roth IRA – $876,355.03(+25.95%)
Wife Roth IRA – $485,811.18(+23.15%)
Wife 401k – $5,431.03(+11.41%)
Traditional 401k – $646,952.83(+11.47%)

Roth/(Traditional+Taxable) % = 55.37% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $2,477,729.77(+21.28%)
Retirement Salary (4%) $99,109

Monthly Contributions $933.84(401k)
SP500 Performance +10.76%
My Monthly Investment Performance +21.24% (+10.48% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +26.81% (+16.05% vs SP500)

Retirement Nestegg Report October 2020

Retirement Nestegg Report October 2020

Another down month for my retirement nestegg and another month of underperformance by my investments. My nestegg however is still up over 60% YTD, so I think I will be ok. This has been my best year ever on every metric and volatility is to be expected. Long term the trajectory looks great.

Fidelity Taxable – $5,117.72(+0.87%)
Taxable Account- $202,311.18(-8.18%)
Private Stock $82,500(+0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $77,484.52(-6.34%)
My Roth IRA – $695,775.93(-7.36%)
Wife Roth IRA – $394,484.57(-7.46%)
Wife 401k – $4,874.69(-1.90%)
Traditional 401k – $580,366.73(-2.51%)

Roth/(Traditional+Taxable) % = 55.37% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $2,042,915.34(-5.78%)
Retirement Salary (4%) $81,716

Monthly Contributions $1,400.76(401k)
SP500 Performance -2.77%
My Monthly Investment Performance -5.85% (-3.08% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -7.45% (-4.68% vs SP500)

Retirement Nestegg Report September 2020

Retirement Nestegg Report September 2020

Well after last months insane month I should not be surprised at all to see my accounts dip a little bit this month. Ironically my first month back to work and my net worth dropped by over $150k, while the 3 previous months where I was not earning income my net worth increased by over $828k.

This means nothing per say especially in those types of short term freak occurrence time frames, but it does put into perspective that I’ve put myself in a situation where working for money is trivial compared to the massive snowball of previously saved and invested dollars that are going to work for me every single day regardless of what I decide to do when I get out of bed.

That part is the incredibly powerful part and was the whole point of everything and I think it’s still something that I am having trouble coming to grasp with as to just what a powerful and meaningful force that is and how to best use it to make my life better.

Big numbers are big and sometimes I don’t fully grasp what my nestegg is worth and capable of. In a relatively non eventful month we just lost a years worth of working salary. In the prior 3 months we gained over 5 years of working salary. That’s insane and what’s really insane is that it’s only going to continue to get more and more insane as time goes on.

Fidelity Taxable – $5,073.72(+3.76%)
Taxable Account- $220,327.48(-10.76%)
Private Stock $82,500(+0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $82,729.94(-2.33%)
My Roth IRA – $751,045.35(-9.11%)
Wife Roth IRA – $426,286.63(-7.38%)
Wife 401k – $4,968.88(-4.80%)
Traditional 401k – $595,324.03(-2.86%)

Roth/(Traditional+Taxable) % = 55.37% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $2,168,256.03(-6.69%)
Retirement Salary (4%) $86,730

Monthly Contributions $531.12(401k)
SP500 Performance -3.92%
My Monthly Investment Performance -6.69% (-2.77% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -8.51% (-4.59% vs SP500)

Retirement Nestegg Report August 2020

Retirement Nestegg Report August 2020

Well an all-time record month for our retirement nestegg in every single category. Our nestegg hit an all time high north of $2.3M which was an increase of over $430k over last months all-time high. Our nestegg grew by 23.41% and our individual stock holdings grew by 31.33% compared to the market returns of 7.01% just this month. This now puts our investment gains north of over $1M year to date.

All of this is mind blowing and I don’t even know what to think. This is a combination of us living significantly below our means for our entire lives, investing that money, and then more recently getting incredibly lucky with the small allocation that we had dedicated to individual stocks.

As far as the path forward I very much am aware of the easy come easy go – especially in the short term, especially with the meteoric rise of Tesla which now accounts for 1/3 of our retirement nestegg. Things will be volatile and I do expect I will be writing reports at lower values than this one. Luckily for me I’m playing a long term game so I don’t have to worry about timing the market like an idiot

What I will work on though is increasing the amount of money I can use for early retirement. I have a unique problem of having enough money to retire, but it is currently kind of in the wrong buckets. Most of it is held in my 401k and IRA accounts which I cannot touch for the next 18 years without paying penalties and taxes. I am going to withdraw the $100k or so of contributions that we made to our Roth IRAs and put it into a taxable account to hopefully grow our taxable account to a figure large enough to live off of for the next 18 years.

Fidelity Taxable – $4,889.74(-13.43%)
Taxable Account- $246,889.41(+55.42%)
Private Stock $82,500(+14.58%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $84,706.37(+9.06%)
My Roth IRA – $826,305.88(+31.36%)
Wife Roth IRA – $460,263.23(+26.88%)
Wife 401k – $5,219.59(+7.38%)
Traditional 401k – $612,867.58(+7.14%)

Roth/(Traditional+Taxable) % = 55.37% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $2,323,641.80(+23.41%)
Retirement Salary (4%) $92,945

Monthly Contributions $5000(Taxable)
SP500 Performance +7.01%
My Monthly Investment Performance +23.41% (+16.40% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +31.33% (+24.32% vs SP500)