Investing General Discussion

Arden

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Worth keeping in mind, IBIT doesn't behave like a normal stock where buying and selling alone push the price up and down.

IBIT tracks BTC price, so you can have huge outflows of IBIT, yet the price actually increases because the price of BTC is going up.

If you pay attention to IBIT inflows/outflows without looking at the bigger BTC price picture, you're missing out on key info.
 
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Sludig

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Did my spreadsheet update for the year, and our portfolio went up more this year than our best earning year of actually working. And that's gross, not net.

Considering our first year of retirement we saw a 21% drop (YoY, peak to valley was even worse), I'd say things are going amazing. 4 years in and our portfolio is 30% higher than our starting point (SPY is about 43.5% in that timeframe), which obviously includes 4 years of withdrawals.

I was actually telling my wife a few days ago we're potentially running into a situation of having too much money. Our taxable account probably has 1 full year remaining to draw from, which means the rest is locked behind 10% early withdrawal fees. However, we're about 15 years from being able to draw those down without it. That said, we'll also start dipping into the Roth ladder soon too, which should likely cover all our expenses. But that means we've got about a 1.5% withdrawal rate on our total portfolio, meaning we saved way too much money.

I've been doing better about spending more money, but switching from saver to spending is significantly harder than I imagined. I was reading some posts about people 8-10 years into early retirement that are finally getting it. I'll definitely revisit this when the market has a bear year and we drop back to our original portfolio value in 2021 though.
Time to start going prepper a bit in case we get like full depression level inflation etc. I'll take a P211 GTO for the advice.

But semi seriously, if you can invest 10-50k without taking a hit on several cases of ammo, guns, maybe gold or making sure you have 3-6 months of food/water etc. It gives you something to do with the money and is there on that slim chance everything came crashing down again slim as it may be.
 
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Furry

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Was lazy about transferring my roth on friday and dumped the 7500 in today. Ree 20$ short of buying 12 shares of voo and stonks are going brr. Settled for 11 voo and 5 vong.
 

Sheriff Cad

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Wife and I both gave our notice at work today.

I expect a 1929 level crash tomorrow, just for karma...
 
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Rangoth

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Wife and I both gave our notice at work today.

I expect a 1929 level crash tomorrow, just for karma...

congratulations! I hope to do the same before the end of the year if the current trend/luck continue! I expect to see you more active in one of the hobby threads ;)
 
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Blazin

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Wife and I both gave our notice at work today.

I expect a 1929 level crash tomorrow, just for karma...
Congratulations! Nice work.

Gravel had quite the test first year, it's bound to come eventually. We are young enough another +50% decline could be in the cards for Gen X but hopefully it will be proceeded by sufficient ridiculousness to soften the blow.
 
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Synj

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Congratulations! Nice work.

Gravel had quite the test first year, it's bound to come eventually. We are young enough another +50% decline could be in the cards for Gen X but hopefully it will be proceeded by sufficient ridiculousness to soften the blow.
I just went full tilt on Venezuela bananas. Follow me for more financial advice.
 
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Sheriff Cad

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Congratulations! Nice work.

Gravel had quite the test first year, it's bound to come eventually. We are young enough another +50% decline could be in the cards for Gen X but hopefully it will be proceeded by sufficient ridiculousness to soften the blow.
I think I've run just about every scenario possible and should be totally fine, the key to me is that we don't actually spend that much, despite having a lot. The period since 2020 has seen our assets go up about 220%...

The funny part is that if you are frugal you save money well, but if you're frugal you don't really need to save money well since you aren't going to spend it, so you just keep saving and ....
 
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Borzak

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I just went full tilt on Venezuela bananas. Follow me for more financial advice.

I wonder how long companies like Chevron can turn it around since it's been almost 20 years. A quick search showed 800k barrels of oil exported per day in 2024. The Motiva refinery in TX refines 600k plus barrels a day (the largest refinery but still only one refinery). A lot of upgrading needs doing there I'm guessing.

Edit - Trump said he is open to paying oil companies to rebuild the oil industry there.
 
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Haus

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I think I've run just about every scenario possible and should be totally fine, the key to me is that we don't actually spend that much, despite having a lot. The period since 2020 has seen our assets go up about 220%...

The funny part is that if you are frugal you save money well, but if you're frugal you don't really need to save money well since you aren't going to spend it, so you just keep saving and ....
Congrats on hitting that milestone sir!

I see that happening for my wife and I in probably 2-3 years. But as discussed elsewhere for me I know it will mean finding something to downshift into to stay busy for a while, just not needing to do the full court press making money like I am right now. I think we're a little in your boat as neither of us are "high upkeep" people, and in our case have no kids to be spending money on, so the burn rate for us is relatively low.

On another note :

I'm looking at making a BIG pivot early this year. The one bad habit I really have in my investment portfolio is that because of the great returns it provided in 2022-2024 I didn't touch the big pile of stock I have in the company I work for (RSU grants vesting, plus employee stock purchase at a tidy 15% discount). It's to the point now it's rivaling the size of my retirement portfolio. I need to diversify. As mentioned above heading into the home stretch towards retirement. How insane am I for thinking about going wholly milquetoast and primarily just moving it into SPY/SPY adjacent ETFs? The alternative is to lay it into the current spread of ETFs I have as my primary store of wealth (Sofi 500 fund, XLK to have money in tech stocks, URNM because I have the wacky belief that Nuclear is the real long term power solution, and HDV because I want some boring dividends).

Trying to find the balance between "something solid" and "overthinking it". And I know I'm prone to overthinking/overengineering things. I also know that I don't want to dive as deep as many of you into the world of leveraged advanced investment.
 

Synj

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Congrats on hitting that milestone sir!

I see that happening for my wife and I in probably 2-3 years. But as discussed elsewhere for me I know it will mean finding something to downshift into to stay busy for a while, just not needing to do the full court press making money like I am right now. I think we're a little in your boat as neither of us are "high upkeep" people, and in our case have no kids to be spending money on, so the burn rate for us is relatively low.

On another note :

I'm looking at making a BIG pivot early this year. The one bad habit I really have in my investment portfolio is that because of the great returns it provided in 2022-2024 I didn't touch the big pile of stock I have in the company I work for (RSU grants vesting, plus employee stock purchase at a tidy 15% discount). It's to the point now it's rivaling the size of my retirement portfolio. I need to diversify. As mentioned above heading into the home stretch towards retirement. How insane am I for thinking about going wholly milquetoast and primarily just moving it into SPY/SPY adjacent ETFs? The alternative is to lay it into the current spread of ETFs I have as my primary store of wealth (Sofi 500 fund, XLK to have money in tech stocks, URNM because I have the wacky belief that Nuclear is the real long term power solution, and HDV because I want some boring dividends).

Trying to find the balance between "something solid" and "overthinking it". And I know I'm prone to overthinking/overengineering things. I also know that I don't want to dive as deep as many of you into the world of leveraged advanced investment.
I had this happen to me late last year. I had a bunch of really nice tech stocks that I purchased in 2018-2020 that had massive runs and were now bulking up my portfolio. I made the decision to shift more conservatively into VOO/SPMO/VXUS and I sleep better at night. I'm not in bonds or SCHD or slow movers, but I feel confident my money will continue to grow at a nice clip and I still have about 10% in NVDA and another 10% in my company RSUs (which I'm selling off every time they vest) but I'm glad to not be so heavily concentrated in any one sector. I've lived through several 30-40%ish declines and that shit was nerve wracking. Not saying I couldn't still see that, but I'm less concerned than I was towards the 4th quarter of last year.

Finances are personal, some people might call it milquetoast, but I feel good about it.
 

Furry

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I think the actual insane part is that you even think to ask this question
SPY and any other S&P500 tracker is the best vehicle if you want to just set and forget it. It's been said here plenty of times, but nothing wrong with a mantra. There are other good choices, but historically S&P is king. Following warren buffet brain dead plan is also very sensible for anyone who is drawing down their account instead of investing.

20% cash/bonds as your spending buffer, 80% s&p.
 

Haus

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I think the actual insane part is that you even think to ask this question
In my case, this is the "sounding board" part of my process. I'm mostly doing a check on "I'm pretty sure this is the smart and easy play, but what do you guys know I might be missing". I ask that because I'll be the first to admit a lot of the folks posting in this thread obviously know a ton more about investing than I do and there might be something I'm just missing. I look at people in here like Blazin Blazin and know I won't ever be on that level of knowing this craziness.

Then again I also know there's a big difference between "every day asshole just putting away for retirement and hoping to maybe to better than average" and "Investing for a living" and I know which side of that see saw I am on.