I’ve started become more aware of how good my investment performance has been of late, but one thing that kind of solidified it for me was not only comparing my performance against the SP500, but then also looking at my investment returns in actual dollar figures. I don’t know why but while I think its cool to have great investment returns and see my nestegg grow by so much each month, I really wasn’t all that blown away by what was happening. Then for some reason I decided to break down my investment returns in actual dollar amounts and for whatever reason kind of blew me away.

This was money that I got and didn’t have to work for (well technically). I mean its the whole point of investing and you are probably thinking “no kidding you idiot – that’s why you invest”, but sort of like a kid who can’t understand why if they take the money they got from their grandparents for their birthday and put in the bank the bank will give them more money for what appears to be no good reason – its almost magical. Well this is sort of how I view how much money I’ve made in the market for just taking some money, not spending it, and throwing it into the stock market.

Here are my $$ returns each year I have been investing.

2006 – $3,603.49
2007 – $2,576.67
2008 – $(35,108.72)
2009 – $22,455.55
2010 – $32,127.00
2011 YTD – $20,737.30

Total money made in stock market in career – $46,391.29

Total money made in last 28 months – $75,319.85

So as you can see of my current $193,285 nestegg 24% of that has come from investment returns or basically money that just fell out of the sky and into my account.

Now granted I sort of cherry picked the dates, but I have been on an absolute tear the last 2+ years have during that time have made over $75,000 in the stock market and in just the first four months of this year I have made over $20,000 or in other words over $5,000 a month.

This to me is what really opened my eyes and was like holy crap – thats a lot of money for really no work and while its not consistent at all and I could just as easily lose $75,000 in next eight months, I’m currently making enough money in my retirement accounts that in theory I could pay my mortgage, take care of my family of five, and still have quite a bit of money left over all for doing next to nothing. The best part about all of this is I am still very young and just getting started. Again I know this is not eye opening revelation for most people and I certainly am not counting on this kind of performance going forward, but it really was eye opening for me to see the power of compounding/great investment returns/ and passive income.

Going forward I think I am actually going to keep track of that value just like I do my total nestegg, because long term thats where the majority of my money is going to come from and like I said for whatever reason it was kind of an eye opener for me.