My Financial Journey

Well the conclusion to a stellar year for my retirement nestegg. It increased in value by over $317,500 in 2019, which is absolutely mind boggling. Granted it was a great year for the market overall and somewhat of an anomaly, but the fact that I had to do zero work or use any brain power and we got $300,000 richer in a year is sort of bonkers.

The stock market was up over 28% this year and my investments were up even more than the market for the year. My contributions on the other hand were the lowest they’ve been in about 10 years as I’ve decided to let the portfolio do the heavy lifting here (working out ok so far).

If I really want to drop my own jaw I simply only need to go back to the end of the last decade where my December 2009 Financial Report where I was sitting at a grand total of $105,415.89 and was feeling pretty good about finishing a month in 6 figures for the first time. Now 10 years later I increased my nestegg by over 3 times the value of my Dec 2009 report. That’s the magic of compounding.

So what does my Dec 2029 report have in store? Will I increase the value of my portfolio by $3.75M in a year? Who knows and honestly it doesn’t matter as accumilating the most money possible is not the goal of this blog. It’s about accumilating enough money as quickly as possible to give me and my family the freedom to not have to worry about money and for all intents and purposes we are already there so everything from here on out is simply gravy.

Taxable Account- $70,069.58(+13.23%)
Private Stock $72,000 (+0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $43,987.57(+3.91%)
My Roth IRA – $307,347.80(+8.82%)
Wife Roth IRA – $195,227.71(+7.98%)
Wife 401k – $4,756.71(+2.99%)
Traditional 401k – $554,871.58(+3.15%)

Roth/Traditional % = 40.26% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $1,248,260.95(+5.61%)
Retirement Salary (4%) $49,930

Monthly Contributions $1,354.98(401k)
SP500 Performance +2.86%
My Monthly Investment Performance +2.94% (-0.47% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +3.10% (-0.31% vs SP500)

My retirement contributions for 2019 $25,366.43
401k $13,117.48
401k matching $12,248.95
My Roth IRA $0
Wife Roth IRA $0
Taxable Account $0
Wife Retirement Account ??

SP500 Performance for 2019 28.72%
Investment Performance for 2019 +32.46% (+3.74% vs SP500)
Individual Stock Performance for 2019 +37.07% (+8.35% vs SP500)
Total Investment Return 2019 +$292,164.67

Another neat milestone is that our estimated retirement income today has now surpassed $50,000 per year using the 4% rule.

For those of you that don’t know the 4% rule it is based off of a bunch of studies of what would be an absolutely safe withdrawal rate from a diversified stock & bond portfolio that would survive even the worst downturns (retiring the day before the great depression) and still have the retiree never run out of money.

This means that if my family of 7 could survive on $50k a year we would be financially independent and never need to earn income again and could just live off our our nestegg.

Now yes the market has been on a very huge runup this year and well for the last decade which is why this update is coming just 6 days after my nestegg just crossed $1.2M for the first time, but again the 4% rule is the based off of the unluckiest investor in the world who retired right before a massive market crash and they still survive. In almost all scenarios the retiree ends up having their portfolio greatly increase in size at the end of their life despite withdrawing 4% every year.

What does this mean for us? I’m not sure as there are a few caveats that we need to figure out. The first being that the vast majority of my money is tied up in retirement accounts that we can’t access for another 19 years without paying a penalty so we’d have to account for that piece.

I know we could live off $50k a year if we needed without too much struggle, but also am not sure we are ready to fully retire at this point as both of our work schedules coincide pretty well with our kids schedules so the only benefit of retiring fully would be to spend individual time outside of our kids and to be honest I’m not sure either of us have any great plans for what we would do with that time, so for the time being we will keep the spigot of additional money flowing in.

The other big wild card is health insurance which is ultimately probably going to be the biggest and most costly item we need to figure out before we pull the plug completely.

So right now this doesn’t affect us too much other than to give us confidence that no matter what happens with our work we are sitting

Taxable Account- $71,065.52
Private Stock $72,000
Traditional Rollover IRA – $44,844.64
My Roth IRA – $309,696.78
Wife Roth IRA – $197,579.94
Wife 401k – $4,744.59
Traditional 401k – $554,514.71

Roth/Traditional % = 40.40% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $1,254,446.18
Retirement Salary (4%) $50,178

Well it took 8 months to hit my next 100k milestone this time, but today my retirement nestegg hit a valuation of $1.2M. Despite the really good market performance my nestegg has actually grown slower the last two milestones than it did the previous 4 milestones. I actually went ahead and added a new column to my table to track the time between milestones.

Part of this is probably because I am not contributing nearly as much to my retirement accounts these days. Previously I was doing a little bit more of the heavy lifting and now I’m sort of doing the bare minimum and letting the nestegg do the heavy lifting on it’s own.

Despite this I expect we should have a new record between milestones coming up here in the future. In fact at some point in the future I expect to be writing two of these types of reports in the same month!

Taxable Account- $66,591.53
Private Stock $72,000
Traditional Rollover IRA – $43,223.63
My Roth IRA – $294,222.91
Wife Roth IRA – $187,810.82
Wife 401k – $4,663.90
Traditional 401k – $544,146.32

Roth/Traditional % = 39.75% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $1,212,659.11
Retirement Salary (4%) $48,506

$100,000 NestEgg Milestones

Date	DOW Jones Value	MFJ Nestegg	Time to Achieve
Oct 2008	10,000	$ 69,300	29 years 2 months
Oct 2009	10,000 (+0%)	$100,000 (+44%)	30 years 2 months
Feb 2012	13,000 (+30%)	$200,000 (+100%)	2 years 5 months
Jul 2013	15,423 (+19%)	$300,000 (+50%)	1 years 5 months
Feb 2014	16,395.88 (+6.3%)	$400,000 (+33%)	7 months
April 2015	18,084.48 (+10.30%)	$500,000 (+25%)	1 year 2 months
August 2016	18,636.05 (+3.05%)	$600,000 (+20%)	1 year 4 months
January 2017	20,068.51 (+7.69%)	$700,000 (+17%)	5 months
June 2017	$21,182.53 (+5.56%)	$800,000 (+14%)	5 months
January 2018	$25,484.72(+20.31%)	$900,000 (+12.5%)	7 months
May 2018	$24,667.78(-3.21%)	$1,000,000 (+11.1%)	4 months
April 2019	$26,234.34 (+2.94%)	$1,100,000 (+10.0%)	11 months
December 2019	$28,331.20 (+7.99%)	$1,200,000 (+9.1%)	8 months

Another all-time high for my retirement nestegg and creeping up on the next 100k mile stone and also getting close to having $50k in forever retirement income which is another cool milestone.

Taxable Account- $61,881.46(+3.68%)
Private Stock $72,000 (+0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $42,332.64(+1.14%)
My Roth IRA – $282,435.80(+3.51%)
Wife Roth IRA – $180,800.01(+2.72%)
Wife 401k – $4,618.79(+3.43%)
Traditional 401k – $537,941.57(+3.94%)

Roth/Traditional % = 39.19% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $1,182,010.27(+3.02%)
Retirement Salary (4%) $47,280

Monthly Contributions $903.32(401k)
SP500 Performance +3.41%
My Monthly Investment Performance +2.94% (-0.47% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +3.10% (-0.31% vs SP500)

Well a very good month for my nestegg and a new all-time high. The market was up over 2% and my investments were up quite a bit more – driven primarily by the big run up in Tesla this month.

Taxable Account- $59,684.60(+10.11%)
Private Stock $72,000 (+0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $41,856.11(-1.82%)
My Roth IRA – $272,855.47(+6.31%)
Wife Roth IRA – $176.012.04(+6.47%)
Wife 401k – $4,465.82(+2.84%)
Traditional 401k – $517,536.16(+2.84%)

Roth/Traditional % = 39.11% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $1,147,419.20(+4.83%)
Retirement Salary (4%) $44,049

Monthly Contributions $903.32(401k)
SP500 Performance +2.04%
My Monthly Investment Performance +4.75% (+2.71% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +6.86% (+4.82% vs SP500)