Well today was a special day for me and my now 12 year old blog. I officially joined the double comma club and achieved another goal set forth on this blog. My $1,000,000 retirement nestegg by age 40 goal. I really thought was a bit of a stretch, but turns out I’ve had stellar returns and actually achieved this goal at the age of 38.
A couple of things stand out for me with this accomplishment. First I added $100,000 to my nestegg in less than 5 months which is the quickest I’ve added $100k. Makes total sense and with the power of compounding these 100k milestones will come quicker and quicker to the point where I will add $100k in a month eventually.
I actually added $100k while the market was down over 3% since my last milestone. My individual stocks have performed very well and have allowed me to best the market over the last 12+ years. I actually would not advise most people to own individual stocks or at least not a significant portion of their portfolio. I have questioned myself whether or not owning individual stocks was worth the effort and risk, but thanks to this blog and some tracking I’ve been able to see that somehow I did a pretty good job picking and managing my individual stocks. That being said I still have nearly half of my portfolio in vanguard index funds in our 401k accounts and that percentage will likely increase over time.
Writing your goals down has a very powerful affect. I started this blog very much for me so that I could look back at my thinking over time and learn from it. I also wanted to set out a vision for what my future would look like financially. This has actually been invaluable to me and I don’t think I would be where I am today without this blog. I also knew deep down that the path I had laid out in my youth was going to result in me becoming wealthy down the road and I wanted to have a good documentation of how I got there. I got there slowly over time through common sense saving and investing that anyone can do. It won’t come quickly and there were short term ups and downs, but in the grand scheme of things it actually was not that hard and anyone can do it given enough time. 12 years seems like an eternity when you are in your early 20s, but looking back from my late 30s the path from $0 to $1,000,000 went pretty darn quick.
I started this blog the year my oldest son was born. He just turned 13 this week, the same week that my nestegg got an extra comma. Life goes so fast and I want to do my best to enjoy it. My Financial Journey was a tool I used to put myself in a situation where I could enjoy life and have more freedom than I would if I took the standard approach to finance.
So what do I do now that I’m a millionaire? I’m not exactly sure, but I do know I have a lot more options having a 7 figure pile of F-you money. In theory I could tap $40k per year out of it and never run out of money (4% rule). I could do nothing and leave it invested and have roughly $3M by age 50, $8M by 60, $13M at age 65, etc.
The final goal in my financial journey will probably fall somewhere in between those two scenarios. I have 5 young kids who are growing up faster than I could have ever imagined and the whole point of all of this was to give me the freedom to spend more time with my family. I now need to spend some time to lay the groundwork for what this looks like and put some tangible plans in place for making this happen. Bottom line our retirement is secure and now I just need to figure out how much my wife and I need to work going forward to meet our short term expenses while our nestegg grows to some larger number that makes working entirely optional.
Cheers!
MFJ
Taxable Account- $53,234.73
Private Stock $66,900
Traditional Rollover IRA – $29,822.55
My Roth IRA – $248,902.12
Wife Roth IRA – $158,073.85
Wife 401k – $3,905.71
Traditional 401k – $442,491.91
Roth/Traditional % = 40.68% (tax free)
Total Retirement Nest Egg $1,003,330.87
Retirement Salary (4%) $40,133
$100,000 NestEgg Milestones
| Date |
DOW Jones Value |
MFJ Nestegg |
| Oct 2008 |
10,000 |
$ 69,300 |
| Oct 2009 |
10,000 (+0%) |
$100,000 (+44%) |
| Feb 2012 |
13,000 (+30%) |
$200,000 (+100%) |
| Jul 2013 |
15,423 (+19%) |
$300,000 (+50%) |
| Feb 2014 |
16,395.88 (+6.3%) |
$400,000 (+33%) |
| April 2015 |
18,084.48 (+10.30%) |
$500,000 (+25%) |
| August 2016 |
18,636.05 (+3.05%) |
$600,000 (+20%) |
| January 2017 |
20,068.51 (+7.69%) |
$700,000 (+17%) |
| June 2017 |
$21,182.53 (+5.56%) |
$800,000 (+14%) |
| January 2018 |
$25,484.72(+20.31%) |
$900,000 (+12.5%) |
| May 2018 |
$24,667.78(-3.21%) |
$1,000,000 (+11.1%) |