My Financial Journey

Well this is more like it. Only 5 months after surpassing the $600k mark I have now surpassed the $700k mark. Part of this is cheating due to the fact that I now include some private stock that was not previously included in my 600k report, but I will take it. It is also interesting that the DOW broke 20,000 for the first time today and the first time I broke $100,000 the DOW was at 10,000 so while the DOW has doubled in size my retirement nestegg has septupled in size. Given the size of my nestegg and the size of my contributions I should now expect to be breaking threw new $100k barriers at least once a year in up years going forward and it will only get easier from there.

Taxable Account – $47,266.28
Private Stock – $60,000
Traditional Rollover IRA – $30,426.88
My Roth IRA – $162,737.58
Wife Roth IRA – $92,116.91
Traditional 401k – $309,917.66

Total Retirement Nestegg – $702,465.31

$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%)

Overall a pretty disappointing year for my Retirement Nestegg. My investments greatly underperformed the market and the market was up a nice amount this year. Overall this is an anomaly based on my previous 10+ years of investing and will not cause me to make any rash changes to my investment philosophy. It is still frustrating though especially when my account is large enough now where even average investment performance probably would have pushed me over the $700k mark.

One area where I knocked it out of the park this year was in my investment contributions. I contributed a record $67,350 to my retirement accounts this year. Part of this was a $25,000 contribution I made to a taxable account with left over money we had after building our house. Overall I want to continue to bump up our taxable account as we start ramping up for early retirement.

Taxable Account- $43,553.69 (+2.25%)
Private Stock $60,000 (+0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $29,225.55 (-5.47%)
My Roth IRA – $150,481.80 (+0.83%)
Wife Roth IRA – $85,092.60 (+4.94%)
Traditional 401k – $302,111.57 (+2.06%)

Roth/Traditional % = 35.43% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $670,465.21(+1.60%)
Retirement Salary (4%) – $26,818

Monthly Contributions $653.13 (401k)
SP500 Performance +1.82%
My Monthly Investment Performance +1.51% (-0.31% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +1.48% (-0.34% vs SP500)

My retirement contributions for 2016 $67,350.70
401k $18,000.00
401k matching $12,350.70
My Roth IRA $5,500
Wife Roth IRA $5,500
Taxable Account $26,000

SP500 Performance for 2016 +9.54%
Investment Performance for 2016 +3.32% (-6.22% vs SP500)
Individual Stock Performance for 2016 -4.57% (-14.11% vs SP500)
Total Investment Return 2016 +$17,455.46

Well another all-time high for my nestegg, but another month of disappointing performance by my individual stock holdings. Overall this year my stocks have trailed the market quite significantly in part to under performance by some of my key holdings like Tesla, Chipotle, Under Armour, Netflix and others. Overall I am not too concerned but it does get frustrating watching the market beat me month after month in 2016. The good news is I have about half of my portfolio in market index funds so not all hope is lost and so far over longer periods of time I still have outperformed by quite a significant margin with my individual stocks, but this is not one of those years. Luckily though I feel as confident as ever that the aforementioned under performing stocks will greatly reward me in the future.

Taxable Account- $42,594.38 (+3.44%)
Private Stock $60,000 (+0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $30,915.37 (+9.14%)
My Roth IRA – $149,245.46 (+2.90%)
Wife Roth IRA – $81,088.55 (-1.50%)
Traditional 401k – $296,022.09 (+4.78%)

Roth/Traditional % = 35.43% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $659,865.85(+3.20%)
Retirement Salary (4%) – $26,394

Monthly Contributions $1,371.16 (401k)
SP500 Performance +3.42%
My Monthly Investment Performance +2.99% (-0.43% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +2.35% (-1.07% vs SP500)

Taxable Account- $41,179.18 (-5.75%)
Private Stock $60,000 (+0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $28,325.27 (-8.74%)
My Roth IRA – $145,046.18 (-1.68%)
Wife Roth IRA – $82,327.47 (+0.89%)
Traditional 401k – $282,527.68 (-2.24%)

Roth/Traditional % = 35.43% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $639,405.78(-2.06%)
Retirement Salary (4%) – $25,576

Monthly Contributions $1,371.16 (401k)
SP500 Performance -1.94%
My Monthly Investment Performance -2.27% (-0.33% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -2.30% (-0.36% vs SP500)

Taxable Account- $43,689.79 (-3.71%)
Private Stock $60,000 (+0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $31,038.00 (-3.99%)
My Roth IRA – $147,529.06 (-1.26%)
Wife Roth IRA – $81,598.29 (-1.29%)
Traditional 401k – $288,999.95 (+1.31%)

Roth/Traditional % = 35.43% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $652,855.09(-0.33%)
Retirement Salary (4%) – $26,114

Monthly Contributions $1,371.16 (401k)
SP500 Performance -0.12%
My Monthly Investment Performance -0.54% (-0.42% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance -1.91% (-1.79% vs SP500)

Well another all-time high for my retirement nestegg and some slight out-performance by my investments. I also broke through the $600,000 mark in the middle of last month

One thing new this month is that I have finally decided to include some private stock that I own in my retirement nestegg report. Historically I have not included this for a number of reasons. First it is not a very liquid asset where I can get an updated value each month – I really only get value on it once a year at the annual stockholders meeting when I get word of recent stock transactions and the book value of the bank. It also historically was a decent chunk of my portfolio so it would have skewed my investing returns – now it is less than 10% so it would not have a very big affect on calculating my performance.

The other reason I have not included it historically is because it was a gift from my father who initially put the $10,000 into starting the bank when I was a freshman in high school and put it in my name. Part of the reason I started this blog was that I knew this journey was going to end up with be accumulating a 7 figure nestegg and I wanted to document how straightforward and simple it is to do and that anyone can do it. Not everyone is getting a $10,000 gift from their parents in high school as an investment so I didn’t want that to detract from the overall success my nestegg would have over the years so I have just pretended it didn’t exist.

That being said I am spending more and more time working out the math for when I feel I am financially independent enough to stop working and this asset will likely be a part of that equation so I have now included it as I believe the focus of this blog will change from counting up how big my nestegg has grown to counting down to the point where my nestegg can provide for all of the living expenses I and my family will need the rest of my life.

Taxable Account- $45,373.53 (-3.57%)
Private Stock $60,000 (+0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $32,328.93 (-0.34%)
My Roth IRA – $149,409.43 (+1.79%)
Wife Roth IRA – $82,656.91 (-0.92%)
Traditional 401k – $285,250.99 (+1.16%)

Roth/Traditional % = 35.43% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $655,019.79(+10.71%)
Retirement Salary (4%) – $26,200.79

Monthly Contributions $1,371.16 (401k) $60,000 (private stock inclusion)
SP500 Performance -0.12%
My Monthly Investment Performance +0.36% (+0.48% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +0.03% (+0.15% vs SP500)

Today I officially broke through the $600,000 barrier for the first time in my life. It actually took me 16 months to add another $100k onto my retirement nestegg which is longer than it took me to go from 400k to 500k and 300k to 400k, which is not exactly how this compounding this is supposed to work. That being said the market has only gained 3-4% while my nestegg has increased 20% in the same time.

This would be all great news, but the vast majority of those gains were not from investment outperformance, but from my contributions as I’ve contributed almost $85k during this period of time. So the good news is I have been able to greatly pick up my contributions in the last 16 months and the good new is that even in a flattish market my nestegg continues to grow and is supercharged waiting for the next uplift of the market to greatly increase the frequencies of these types of posts.

Taxable Account – $46,743.60
Traditional Rollover IRA – $33,088.57
My Roth IRA – $149,981.23
Wife Roth IRA – $84,937.29
Traditional 401k – $286,484.24

Total Retirement Nestegg – $601,234.93

$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%)