Performance Update: Q3 Madness!

My main goal* was to build an investment and cash portfolio of $1,120,000* ($1,000,000 to retire on and $120,000 to pay off the house) in 1500 days**, starting from 1/1/2013 and ending in February of 2017. I made my goal in 2016, my 1500 Days are over, and I’ve left my job. In the interest of openness, I’ll continue to share my numbers every quarter.

Q3 Madness!

Yikes. And good “yikes.” Q3 was a great one for Mindy and me. Our investments jumped from $5,904,562 to $6,842,903 for a gain of $938,341 (!). Add our primary home ($400,000 in equity) and our net worth sits at $7,242,903:

Numbers like this are surreal.

I still remember eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch and spaghetti for dinner every day when I had an apartment in college. These were the only things I could afford.

I still remember making $37,000/year as an entry level software developer. This was before taxes! In today’s dollars, that would be about $72,000. So if I divide our Q3 appreciation by my old starting salary:

$938,314/ $72,000 = 13

In one quarter, our portfolio appreciated what it would have taken me 13 years to earn at that first job. If you learn nothing else from reading my silly words, it’s this:

It’s always better to make money work for you than to work for money.

I still remember having severe anxiety for all of my professional life over losing my job. Money and the fear of not having it impacted me harshly. Although that same fear certainly made me work harder which led to more money. While a good career is important, I put it on a pedestal that it did not deserve.

Living with a constant soundtrack of anxiety in the background isn’t healthy. However life is good now. You don’t get a Do Over button, but if I could speak to my younger self, I would tell him to calm the **** down.

How Our Net Worth Jumped By Almost $1,000,000 In 3 Months

Stocks Silliness

Google and Tesla, two of our biggest holdings, did very well:

• Tesla: $359,000 gain (share price went from $317 to $444)
• Google: $85,000 gain ($177 to $245)

Tesla’s valuation is very aggressive. Its next version of FSD (autonomous driving system) needs to show solid progress. While the current version (13) is very good, it’s not robotaxi good. I have to intervene about every 500-1,000 miles. This is an incredible achievement, but nowhere close to where it needs to be for driverless operation.

Google’s Waymo is doing very well. The service has an awesome safety record and has started to expand aggressively.

And robot cars aside, Google is doing very well. The company is underestimated.

SpaceX and Impulse Space

We invested in two private companies, SpaceX and Impulse Space. Both were repriced upward:

• SpaceX: $81,000
• Impulse: $142,000

I’m mostly an index investor now, but once in a while, my Spidey Sense (Stocky Sense?) tingles. This definitely happened with these two companies:

• SpaceX: Little competition, massive moat, passionate engineers, huge opportunities, TAM expansion.
• Impulse: I’ve followed its founder Thomas Mueller for a long time he’s an incredible engineer.

I’ve been obsessed with rockets and space technology all of my life. This is what I know and understand and is one of the few corners I see around that others do not.

Robinhood

Robinhood offered a 3% transfer bonus offer. I moved our after-tax portfolio of $1,700,000 from ETrade to snag $51,000 (!) in free money. The downside of this offer is that I have to give a prorated amount back if I don’t maintain a balance equivalent to the amount that I transferred in.

Mindy Brings Home The Bacon

Mindy got a real estate license so we could save money on the transaction costs of our flips. We’re not flipping any more, but she’ll occasionally represent a friend who is buying or selling real estate. In Q3, she made $41,000 from two commissions.

Wealth Is Good

Money is liberating. If some shit-storm shows up, big money can solve big problems.

The small things matter too. I don’t feel bad about going to Chipotle. I used to.

But I still have the same blue collar mentality I’ve had all my life and will never completely let it go. Why rely on others to fix something I can fix myself? Why pay someone a ridiculous amount of money to perform a service when I can save big money and do it myself?

But those attitudes aren’t always healthy. Once you have enough, money becomes the ultimate tool to buy your time back so you don’t have to do things you really don’t want to do (I HATE working on cars).

But once in a while, I’m still going to step in and take on a big project. Like this:

Where Do We Go Now?

2026 might be the most interesting year yet for our portfolio. Almost 1/3 of our money is tied up in Tesla and SpaceX and the next 12 months is very important for both:

• Tesla: Elon has bet the company on autonomy and robotaxis. In 2026, we’ll finally see if Tesla is able to pull it off. I have a Tesla and the latest wide release of FSD (13.2.9) is very good, but not robotaxi good. As a car company, Tesla is way overvalued. However if it can deploy a large robotaxi network, this stock has room to run. That’s a very big if.
• SpaceX will attempt to catch and reuse the second stage of its new rocket system. This would be one of the greatest engineering achievements of all time and if SpaceX can pull it off, its mass-to-space costs will go waaay down.

In general, the markets feel a little frothy. Could we be in an AI bubble? I don’t know. More importantly, I don’t care. To the long-term investor, a 25% drop is a minor blip a decade later.

Next post! I finally get to talk about our Very Big Project! In the meantime, enjoy this photo of the business end of Starship’s 11th flight test:

More 1500 Days!!!

You can also find me (and the dinosaurs) at:

• Longmont: Want to join our community? Get your ass here! While your at it, join our coworking spot!
• Instagram: Pretty pictures of dinosaurs, sunsets, and nail guns!
• Twitter: Spontaneous, often insane, ramblings
• YouTube: My channel is mostly devoted to home improvement, but I have some other material coming up soon too.
• Buying a Tesla? Use my referral code to get some perks!

*My goal wasn’t to have $1,120,000 at the end of 1500 days, but at any time before the day count was up. Why? It all goes back to the 4% Rule. Remember that our little friend, Mr. 4%, is nothing more than the most conservative safe withdrawal rate. Since my investment portfolio now sits at $1,550,000, I can spend about $62,000 in my first year of retirement.

**My original goal was $1,000,000 and no debt, I later raised the goal by $120,000 to $1,120,000 because I will have debt in the form of a mortgage and I firmly believe in not paying it off (LOOK at the MONEY I’m MAKING!). My compromise was to have enough money put away to cover the mortgage at the time of retirement.

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