My Financial Journey

Well a pretty exciting month for my retirement nestegg – though it ended up not finishing up quite as exciting as it looked like it might. I think at one point this month my retirement nestegg was down almost $40,000 from its overall high, but ended up making most of it back as stocks rallied the second half of the month. What does this mean for me? Well nothing really – other than I thought I might have some magical power over the stock market as the last time I mentioned about wanting to stocks to fall we had the crash of 08/09 and two months ago I wrote something similar and down we headed.

But anyway I will say it again I’m very glad I started tracking my performance against the SP500 as even in a down month like this where most people would be like oh crap my accounts shrunk by $11,000 – life sucks. I can be like awesome I beat the market by well over 1% again just this month. Certainly gives you a different perspective on things even though you shouldn’t even be looking at things in such a short period of time – it makes me feel good and makes me feel like I’m making progress and is 7 months in a row my performance has bested the SP500.

Here is my report

Traditional Rollover IRA – $14,485.30 (-4.44%)
My Roth IRA – $50,224.67 (-4.80%)
Wife Roth IRA – $24,469.87 (-9.48%)
Current Traditional 401k – $87,206.08 (-6.48%)

Roth/Traditional % = 42.47 % (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $176,385.92 (-6.27%)

Monthly Contributions $693.10 (401k)
SPY Performance -7.79%
My Monthly Investment Performance -6.64% (+1.15%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -6.08% (+1.71%)

Well another negative month for my retirement nestegg total, but again another month where my investment performance easily outpaced the SP500. These month to month results really mean nothing but all of these individual monthly one ups on the SP500 are really starting to translate into long term outperformance of the SP500 which is every investors benchmark and one that most investors fail to beat so I feel pretty good about that and makes me kind of glad that I didn’t follow my own advice by investing strictly in index funds (which is the smart thing that essentially everyone should do).

Traditional Rollover IRA – $15,157.54 (-2.47%)
My Roth IRA – $52,758.36 (-0.19%)
Wife Roth IRA – $27,032.05 (-1.52%)
Current Traditional 401k – $93,247.13 (-1.46%)

Roth/Traditional % = 42.40 % (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $188,195.08 (-1.09%)

Monthly Contributions $693.10 (401k)
SPY Performance -2.00%
My Monthly Investment Performance -1.46% (+0.54%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -0.73% (+1.27%)

Another negative month for my retirement nestegg report, but my investments beat the market pretty handily again this month. Heading the wrong direction from the $200,000 milestone but like I said last month I really don’t mind that at all as long as it means the market as a whole is headed south it will give me an opportunity to pick up some additional investments at less expensive values, but doubt we will get an opportunity like the crash of 2007-2009 anytime soon – though one can only hope. Here is my monthly report.

Traditional Rollover IRA – $15,541.70 (-0.46%)
My Roth IRA – $52,657.43 (-0.21%)
Wife Roth IRA – $27,449.60 (-2.97%)
Current Traditional 401k – $94,629.51 (-1.06%)

Roth/Traditional % = 42.10 % (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $190,278.24 (-1.06%)

Monthly Contributions $693.10 (401k)
SPY Performance -2.17%
My Monthly Investment Performance -1.42% (+0.75%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -1.05% (+1.12%)

Well my retirement nestegg went the wrong way this month – which amazingly is the first time since August of 2010 that my retirement nestegg shrunk from month to month. To be fair though during that same period of time the SP500 only went negative twice and was flat once so it’s not like I’m necessarily an investing genius. Like I’ve always said its fun to see your accounts growing each month, but I would very much welcome my accounts getting slashed in half like they did a few years ago as it has provided me as a young buyer with lots of time on his hands an opportunity to really get some bargain deals on stocks and has really super charged the growth of my retirement nestegg. It makes it so much easier to “beat the market” when things are going down and super volatile than it is when the market is doing nothing but going up.

Traditional Rollover IRA – $15,613.08 (+1.02%)
My Roth IRA – $52,767.01 (+0.38%)
Wife Roth IRA – $28,287.66 (-2.28%)
Current Traditional 401k – $95,646.46 (-0.72%)

Roth/Traditional % = 42.15 % (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $192,314.21 (-0.50%)

Monthly Contributions $693.10 (401k)
SPY Performance -0.79%
My Monthly Investment Performance -0.86% (-0.07%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -0.28% (+0.51%)

Well another strong month of growth for my retirement nestegg and another strong month of investment returns bla bla bla. Seems to be a reoccurring theme each month and makes these monthly posts pretty monotonous. I am closely sneaking up on the $200,000 figure for my retirement nestegg and both my 401k and my individual stock accounts are each getting close to $100k a piece. So potentially lots of neat little milestones next month if I have another month like this one.

A few other interesting things happened last month. In my last monthly report I mentioned I got a 4% annual raise. Well I was feeling pretty good about myself and decided to go back to my boss and tell him that 4% just wasn’t going to cut it – and he bumped it up to 14.4% and I am now making over $100k a year in base salary from my primary job – which is kind of cool.

The other item is that our house savings account surpassed $100,000 last month – which as I pointed out last month is not so cool because its cost me a lot of potential investment gains as that extra money would have all gone into our retirement accounts, but is something we decided to do and will allow us to hopefully get a chunk of land out in the country and build a house on it.

Anyway here is the report

Traditional Rollover IRA – $15,455.57 (+8.91%)
My Roth IRA – $ 52,569.45 (+4.00%)
Wife Roth IRA – $28,917.87 (+1.10%)
Current Traditional 401k – $96,342.28 (+4.86%)

Roth/Traditional % = 42.16 % (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $193,285.17 (+4.35%)

Monthly Contributions $1,039.65 (401k)
SPY Performance +2.90%
My Monthly Investment Performance +3.77% (+0.87%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +3.84% (+0.94%)

Another very strong month for my retirement nestegg report despite the fact that the SP500 was slightly negative for the month. Once again my investment performance, especially my individual stocks have greatly outpaced the SP500. I also had a rather large 401k contribution this month due to a rather large bonus I received at work. I also got my annual raise (4%) which bumps up the contributions somewhat.

I have not contributed to my individual stock accounts since 2008 since we are saving for a house, yet those accounts are growing so fast that they are still outpacing my 401k where I am contributing about $15,000 a year. Maybe making me rethink that logic, but at my current contribution rate through work it is guaranteeing I am getting 100% match of my 401k contributions up to 9.5% – so in reality I am contributing 5% of my salary to get 14.5% total contribution which is pretty kick butt and hard to pass up and rely on my continued stock picking prowess to beat the essentially 100%+ match I get through work. What I should be doing is stopping saving for that stupid house.

Anyway here is the report.

Traditional Rollover IRA – $14,191.79 (+4.15%)
My Roth IRA – $50,545.87 (+4.39%)
Wife Roth IRA – $28,615.95 (+1.41%)
Current Traditional 401k – $91,874.98 (+3.99%)

Roth/Traditional % = 42.73 % (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $185,228.59 (+3.70%)

Monthly Contributions $2,740.04 (401k)
SPY Performance -0.04%
My Monthly Investment Performance +2.17% (+2.21%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +3.42% (+3.46%)

Well another positive month for my retirement nestegg as it grew $13,000 this month. You can really see the power of compounding – if this amount of growth had happened a few years ago I probably would have fallen out of my chair as it would have nearly doubled my retirement nestegg, but now it just gets a yawn out of me. My investment performance was really strong this month and made up for last months sub-par performance. Also I had a fairly large amount of contributions this month due to the fact that my employer contributed $4800+ to my 401k as part of their annual contribution. My employer is very generous and matches 9.5% of your salary in your 401k if you contribute 5% on your own.

Anyway here is the report.

Traditional Rollover IRA – $13,626.86 (+7.05%)
My Roth IRA – $48,418.63 (+4.90%)
Wife Roth IRA – $28,219.40 (+7.59%)
Current Traditional 401k – $88,348.30 (+9.80%)

Roth/Traditional % = 42.90 % (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $178,613.19 (+7.69%)

Monthly Contributions $5,467.44 (401k)
SPY Performance +3.47%
My Monthly Investment Performance +4.39% (+0.92%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +5.70% (+2.23%)