My Financial Journey

Well things are headed down again and I have to admit I am sort of hooked back into the market and have been doing a lot of research on possible investments again. Funny if you read my posts from the turn of the year I had pretty much said I was in cruise control and would only be looking at my investments a couple times a year. Well that certainly hasn’t been the case and I have been doing a lot more research and been buying a few new stocks as of late.

Part of my excitement may have been due to the fact that the market is headed south again and also because I went back and calculated my individual stock performance since I started investing (previously I had lumped it in with my 401k/mutual funds) and found out that my individual stocks purchases are consistently beating the market and my mutual fund purchases and have been the last 4 years. You can now see this additional line item “Individual Stock Performance” and my performance vs the SP500 at the end of each Nestegg Report.

Here is my individual stock performance for 2006-2010 YTD vs the SP500
2006 -1.59%
2007 +1.76%
2008 +1.42%
2009 +9.32%
2010 YTD +6.13%

The only year I have trailed the SP500 was my first year and I sure picked some horrible stocks with my first couple purchases. Since then I have been doing pretty well. I guess this justifies some of the time I spend researching individual stocks.

Here is my monthly nestegg report.

Traditional Rollover IRA – $10,792.32 (-2.27%)
My Roth IRA – $33,229.84 (-2.72%)
Wife Roth IRA – $18,681.44 (-7.15%)
Current Traditional 401k – $59,670.70 (-2.29%)

Roth/Traditional % = 42.42 % (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $122,374.30 (-3.18%)

Monthly Contributions $908.76 (401k)
SPY Performance -5.15%
My Monthly Investment Performance -3.90 % (+1.25%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -4.52 % (+0.63%)

Well another volatile month for the stock market and I think I read somewhere that this was the worst May for the stock market since 1962. This is good news for young people like me as long as we can keep our jobs as this will likely allow us to buy the stocks that will fuel our investment performance over the next 30 years at very discounted prices. I believe the last downturn I did a very good job of keeping my cool and sticking with my plan and taking advantage of the depressed stock prices. I also had the luxury of seeing how fast things grow in a recovery and how all of that keeping your cool when the world is ending really pays off. I can’t tell you how many investments I have had grow 100%,200%,500% or more in the span of only a year and countless others that I had considered purchasing do the same. I am proud of how I handled the last downturn, but really feel I will have a leg up for future downturns. Anyway here is this months retirement nestegg report

Traditional Rollover IRA – $11,043.50 (-7.25%)
My Roth IRA – $34,159.75 (-7.54%)
Wife Roth IRA – $20,119.40 (-3.74%)
Current Traditional 401k – $61,068.04 (-9.34%)

Roth/Traditional % = 42.95 % (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $126,390.69 (-7.82%)

Monthly Contributions $605.84 (401k)
SPY Performance -8.38%
My Monthly Investment Performance -8.26 % (+0.12%)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -6.35 % (+2.03%)

Traditional Rollover IRA – $11,906.58 (-1.03%)
My Roth IRA – $36,947.37 (+4.14%)
Wife Roth IRA – $20,901.23 (+7.81%)
Current Traditional 401k – $67,360.15 (+2.73%)

Roth/Traditional % = 42.19 % (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $137,115.33 (+3.51%)

Monthly Contributions $605.84 (401k)
SPY Performance +3.04%
My Monthly Investment Performance +3.05 % (+0.01%)
My Monthly Individual Stock Performance +4.27 % (+1.18%)

I am actually kind of stunned at how fast my nest egg has been growing of late. It wasn’t too long ago I just passed $100k and now I’m 1/3rd of the way to $200k. In fact just 13 months ago my retirement nestegg was sitting at a measly $59k and the best part is the market is doing all of the hard work for me. My contributions have slowed down pretty considerably lately since we are saving for a new house and yet my nestegg is ballooning. This is directly related to the extra money I invested when the market was tanking and just shows the power of consistently investing money in the market over time and over the long term – good things are likely to happen.

Something new this month that I realized wasn’t too hard to include is my investment performance against the SP500 each month. This will exclude any contributions that I made this month and show the true reason my accounts are rising or falling and whether or not my personal decision not to just buy index funds is a worthwhile effort. I went and updated the previous reports and so far in 2010 I am beating the SP500 by 11.83% 1.29% (mistakingly included 401k vesting berfore) I also calculated my performance for last year and last year I beat the SP500 by 9.26% 6.29% so I must be doing something right. Anyway here is this month’s report.

Traditional Rollover IRA – $12,030.93 (+9.77%)
My Roth IRA – $35,478.99 (+5.06%)
Wife Roth IRA – $19,387.04 (+3.88%)
Current Traditional 401k – $65,569.25 (+11.57%)

Roth/Traditional % = 41.42% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $132,466.21 (+8.43%)

Monthly Contributions $3,021.70 (401k)
SPY Performance +4.19% 5.65% (forgot dividend)
My Monthly Investment Performance +5.96% (+0.31%)
My Monthly Individual Stock Performance +5.53% (-0.12%)

Another strong month this month. Part of this is due to the fact that my company put in their year end 5.5% contribution into my 401k (this is on top of the 4% they match with each paycheck). I also had some very strong performance in some of my larger stock holdings. One thing that I am going to start adding to these reports just as a reference point is the gain of the SP500 during the month. This won’t be entirely useful as I don’t subtract out contributions when calculating my gains, but I still think it would be a good reference to have. Anyway here is my report.

Traditional Rollover IRA – $10,959.90 (+0.74%)
My Roth IRA – $ 33,769.03 (+6.27%)
Wife Roth IRA – $18,663.59 (+5.94%)
Current Traditional 401k – $58,770.74 (+12.47%)

Roth/Traditional % = 42.92% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $122,163.26 (+8.56%)

My contributions this month – $5,492.45
SPY Performance +2.39%
My Monthly Investment Performance +3.68% (+1.29%)
My Monthly Stock Investment Performance +3.68% (+2.79%)

Well the market turned a little south this month, but my retirement nestegg actually grew at a pretty good pace this month. This was entirely due to the fact that I am now fully vested in my company’s 401k matching money. My company has a very generous 401k matching program where they match dollar for dollar up to 4% of your salary and that money is 100% vested from day 1 of employment and is deposited in your 401k account with each paycheck. They also contribute another 5.5% of your salary in matching funds regardless of whether or not you contribute to your 401k at the end of each year. This is the money that is not vested until 3 years of employment – Friday was my 3 year anniversary so this resulted in about $10,000 being added to my 401k balance!

Traditional Rollover IRA – $10,879.66 (-0.36%)
My Roth IRA – $ 31,775.51 (-1.62%)
Wife Roth IRA – $17,617.68 (-1.77%)
Current Traditional 401k – $52,254.95 (+18.06%)

Roth/Traditional % = 43.89% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $112,527.80 (+6.75%)

My contributions this month – $10,579.91 (401k vesting)
SPY Performance -3.63%
My Monthly Investment Performance -3.29% (+0.34%)
My Monthly Individual Stock Performance -1.44% (+2.19%)

Well 2009 has come to an end and my retirement nestegg is at an all-time high. Despite things being so horrible and everything being in shambles with the economy my retirement nestegg grew 76% this year and to be honest other than these reports I barely noticed or barely cared. In fact I am to the point now where I can go a month or more without even looking at a stock market ticker or knowing whether the market went up or down, and to be honest I think this is a really good thing.

I’ve learned a lot over the past 4-5 years – I had lots of fun seeing my nestegg grow and my stocks jump or fall 20% or more in one day, but now after a few years I’ve realized that day to day, month to month, or year to year fluctuations really don’t mean anything and its just a waste of time to follow or care about them. I did my few years of homework and learned tons about personal finance and investing, put a plan together, and now I am in cruise control and can spend my time worrying about more important things like watching my kids grow up and working on my golf game. No amount of time and daily effort on my part is going to make a bit of difference on whether a stock or mutual fund of mine is going to go up or down or for me to try to rationalize why something went up or down. It simply does not matter. People who spend time doing this are wasting their time and probably hurting their performance, because well when you follow something so intently – you tend to take action – which is usually a bad thing.

From now on I will create these monthly reports – well partly because I started them from the beginning and its fun to see how the month to month fluctuations mean absolutely nothing in the long term. From now on I will check my investments maybe once or twice a year and then pretty much forget about them and live my life – which in the end is the whole purpose of this investing game.

Anyway here is my 2009 year end nestegg report and a chart of its growth over 2009.

Traditional Rollover IRA – $10,919.10 (+5.66%)
My Roth IRA – $32,298.79 (+5.58%)
Wife Roth IRA – $17,936.49 (+6.75%)
Current Traditional 401k – $44,261.51 (+13.03%)

Roth/Traditional % = 47.65% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $105,415.89 (+8.80%)
My Contributions for 2009 $14,383.91
SPY Performance for 2009 +26.46%
Investment Performance for 2009 +32.75 (+6.29%)
Individual Stock Performance for 2009 +35.78% (+9.32%)
Total Investment Return +$22,455.55