Yet another obligatory 2023 Review Post! Bleh!!!
Sigh. I’ll try to make it fun.
Investments!
We had a very good year. Our net worth started at $3,342,821 and ended at $4,792,750 for a 43% gain or $1,449,929. Yowsers! That’s our biggest year ever:
Tech did very well and our biggest holding, Tesla, killed it. The stock had a stellar 2023, starting at $118 and ending at $248. This $130/share gain accounted for about $585,000 of our gains.
But in the context of the past 2 years, the numbers aren’t nearly as great. We’re still below our all-time high reached back in November of 2021 when our net worth was a bit over $5,000,000. And back then, Tesla was over $400/share (very exhuberant!)
2023, AI, 2024, And More Tesla
- 2023! The S&P 500 and NASDAQ were up 24.2% and 43% respectively. Note that our net worth increase matched the NASDAQ, but our portfolio actually performed much better. Our number is a bit lower than it would have been otherwise because we sold stocks to pay for some big purchases. More on that in a moment.
- Artificial Intelligence: 2023 was the year AI came on strong. And we’re still in the first inning. it will be very interesting to watch how AI developments unfold this decade.
- 2024: Rate cuts! Yay! We could be in for another good year as the economy loosens up because of cheaper money. Home sales should pick up and maybe we see growth stocks do very well again.
- Tesla: This our main holding. I’m still not sure what I’ll do with it.:
- Tesla isn’t just a car company. It’s Supercharger network and stationary storage businesses are poised for huge growth.
- However, with a PE of over 80, Tesla has big valuation boots to fill. Tesla stock may struggle without a clear path to autonomy. And I don’t see a clear path. I believe that the much hyped V12 of FSD will be another disappointment. I hope that I’m wrong.
Spend! Spend!! Spend!?
2023 was the year of big spending experiments. Big purchases include:
- Taylor Swift concert ticket: $1,000
- Private concert: $10,000
- Hawaii vacation: $11,000
- NYC vacation: $12,000
- Chevy Bolt: $30,000
- Tesla Model Y: $50,000
$114,000. (!!!)
That’s a lot of dollars and the number above makes me puke in my mouth a little. But it also must be taken in context.
We haven’t bought a new car since 2010* and this year, we bought two. I doubt we’ll buy another car this decade.
The vacations were spending experiments. Would the experiences make us happy? The answer is:
Yes, but with an asterisk.
*Three thoughts on travel:
- Visiting new places is great, but Mindy and I agree that we went overboard. We like being at home and spending time with our friends and the awesome Longmont community. Also, Colorado doesn’t suck. We’re going to make it a priority to stay at home much more in 2024.
- Big trips require big planning. While the vacations were fun, there’s a lot of mental overhead that goes into planning adventures. This part isn’t so fun.
- Traditional travel kind of sucks. I don’t like the words travel or vacation. “Let’s go somewhere for a week and see a bunch of stuff as fast as we can!” Our trips were short because of constrictions in our kids’ schedules. Post-kids, instead of vacations, we’ll live in different corners of the world for a month at a time, but keep a home base in Longmont where we’ll continue to spend most of our life. Slow travel is where it’s at.
Life
I sound like a broken record, but 2023 was really busy. We wrapped up our project house and got it rented. Work included:
- Remodeling a bathroom
- Building a custom shelving unit
- Xeriscaping (replacing grass with water friendly landscaping)
- Building a huge retaining wall
- Refinishing over 1,000 square feet of oak flooring
- Repairing roof issues
Meanwhile at our primary house:
- Completely rebuilt the master bath
- Remodeled the girls’ bath
- Finished the flooring in the top level
- Xeriscaped the yard
- Built a booth in the kitchen
It was a lot of work and I’m ready to be done for now:
Now it’s time to wrap up the book project and bring on new challenges.
- Fitness: I have new goals for my old carcass. More soon. With pics. #Oof
- Podcast: Mindy and I have been working on a podcast (also on YouTube), something we’ve discussed for a long time. It will formally launch on 1/1. I’m a little choppy in the first couple of episodes, but I catch my groove around the 4th one.
- Nothing: I greatly enjoyed taking the summer off from most projects. It was nice to walk 30,000 steps per day while listening to podcasts and music. I look forward to more of doing nothing in 2024.
Surpassing Max Q
Max q is maximum dynamic pressure. You say:
WTF does that mean?!??
In rocketry, it’s the point of the launch where the airframe is undergoing the most stress. This usually happens a minute or two after launch. The rocket is accelerating quickly and the atmosphere is pushing back hard. Soon after, the air thins and stress declines. After max q, the rocket isn’t totally safe, but it’s a huge milestone.
2023 was the year that I feel like our money passed max q. The chance of financial hardship is very small. As long as we don’t do something crazy like buy an island, there isn’t much that can disrupt our money. This may sound a little bit silly since we’ve had more than $2,000,000 since the start of 2020. I suppose it’s a reflection of my insecurity. Old thinking and biases can take a long time to overcome. But I’m in a good place now.
And hell yeah, life is great.
I hope y’all had a prosperous and healthy 2023. And I hope your 2024 is even better.
Onward and upward!
Happy New Year!
More 1500 Days!!!
You can also find me (and the dinosaurs) at:
Mile High FI podcast:
MindyOnMoney podcast! We’re launching on 1/1/2024!
Also here:
- Facebook: Facebook group and page
- YouTube: My channel is mostly devoted to home improvement, but I have some other material coming up soon too.
- Instagram: Pretty pictures of dinosaurs, sunsets, and nail guns!
- Twitter: Spontaneous, often insane, ramblings
- Coworking space: On the surface, MMM HQ is a coworking space. Look a little deeper and you’ll see that we’re really building community. The members of MMM HQ are some of the finest people I know
- Buying a Tesla? Use my referral code to get some perks!
*We did have an Acura NSX for a short time which we bought and sold for the exact same amount of money.
Super impressive, but wondering about psychology.
Would a halving of Tesla again not cause some psychological stress? What about derisking and diversifying some when you’ve already won the game?
I dont have the stomach for it, but thats also why I missed Tesla, Nasdaq and Bitcoin and instead stayed with emerging markets that were mostly flat in USD in 2023 lol…
Good luck for 2024, hope it’s a good one!
Totally get where you’re coming from with the risk factor. I guess it’s all about how much uncertainty we can handle, right? And hey, sometimes playing it safe with investments like emerging markets is just as smart. Here’s to hoping 2024 brings some good surprises our way!
Tesla did the halving at the end of 2022, going down to about $100 after Musk’s Twitter fiasco. And now that I think about it, its all-time high was $400, so this was much more than a halving. However, it didn’t bother me because nothing had really changed with Tesla itself. People were just losing their minds because Musk was selling big quantities of the stock to raise funds.
However, I’m beginning to question Tesla’s long-term prospects. I don’t see it solving FSD any time soon and it’s valuation is aggressive.
After hearing about Tesla’s stock fluctuations, I also noticed something else: Tesla significantly nerfed the Autopilot feature in my friend’s Tesla Model 3. This move adds to my concerns about the company’s ability to deliver on its Full Self-Driving promises. The valuation might be aggressive, especially considering these recent developments.
I agree short term travel or 1 week vacations are not my fave… I much rather slow travel. Even during 1 week vacations I try not to pack seeing all the things. Preferring the slower pace. Still we are experimenting with weekend trips which are even shorter but they are usually local ..aka driveable. 🙂