Traditional Rollover IRA $17,604.34
My Roth IRA $52,623.89
Wife Roth IRA $25,600.70
Current Traditional 401k $104,658.75
Total Retirement Nest Egg $200,487.68
Fell kind of dorky doing this 2 days before the end of the month but wanted to celebrate a mini milestone the day after it happened. Just 28 months ago I wrote my post celebrating that I had broken 6 figures for the first time and as of yesterday I broke $200,000 for the first time.
A couple things to point out. Just a little over three years ago the market was in turmoil and my retirement nestegg had dropped nearly in half. Everything was doom and gloom and even the most ardent long term financial advisers were second guessing the stock market. I kept my cool and stuck with my plan and now have a nestegg that has nearly quadrupled from lows just 3 years ago.
I started investing in 2004 and it took me about 5 years to grow my nestegg to $100k. It took me less than half that time to grow my next $100k, which is starting to show the power of compound interest. No longer am I doing the majority of the heavy lifting with my saving and contributions, now I have the ball rolling downhill and my money is making me money – which is such an awesome thing. Now yes the market has been going gangbusters the last three years, but its still pretty obvious that the longer you are invested the easier it is to make money. Compound interest it is your friend.
When I wrote my breaking $100k post 28 months ago the DOW had just broken through the 10,000 mark for the first time in a year. So exactly 1 year before I broke through $100k the DOW was at 10,000 and my Retirement Nestegg Report was at $69,300. 1 year later my nestegg was at $100,000 and the DOW was still at 10,000. Now 28 months later the DOW is up 30% to 13,000 and my retirement nestegg is up 100% to 200,000. So in the last 40 months the DOW has grown by 30% and my retirement nestegg has grown by 189%. Which means I am doing something right with my investments – which supercharges the compound interest power.
Kind of related to that previous point but I have been doing an absolutely crappy job saving for my retirement the last three years. I contribute the bare minimum to my 401k to get full matching and have not contributed a penny more to my 401k or our Roth IRAs. Instead we have been aggressively saving to purchase a large parcel of land out in the country and build a house. In fact our house/land savings has surpassed our existing $120k mortgage and is growing at a good rate each month.
One thing I have said in the past is I absolutely wanted to concentrate on saving for our retirement as absolutely soon as possible after I got my first job and to completely ignore other things such as our kids college savings. I knew how important it was for us to get our retirement savings on the right track to take advantage of compound interest and always said once I was sure that was on the right track I could worry about those other things such as kids savings in the future – I think the exact quote was “I could just turn my income spigot at their college education if I so chose.”
Well we aren’t worrying so much about the college savings yet but I did move the “income spigot” towards our house savings and was able to save a large amount of money in a short time and I have not seriously set back our retirement goals because I already got that ball rolling. You can never make up the lost time when savings for retirement and those first chunk of years are so vitally important when it comes to the power/value it gives you in compounding that if you just take care of that right away its really hard to mess things up in the future if you do something dumb like save for an extravagant house or your kids college education.
Anyway I hope to be here less than 28 months from now to celebrate hitting $400k and hopefully will be writing this from our dream house out in the country.
