Milestone today - meaningless but nice

Hi all
I think I’m one of the “oldest” mustachian in Switzerland - I’ve started reading MMM blog in fall 2013 and registered on the MMM forum in march 2014. There I did contribute a lot before moving over to this forum around 2018 (see for instance this thread)

So around September 2012 my bank account was a whopping 2000 chf - I was fresh out of studies (actually officiallly I had my mechatronics engineering Master in 2013). I did part-time work and study in Zurich and lived on a tight budget but manage it.
I count everything in my wealth - I had basically 0.- in my 2nd pillar and no 3rd pillar.

Exactly 4 years later (September 2016), I had saved my first 100k. It took 48 months, and it was difficult to stay the course, being frugal etc. I had a daughter in the meantime, and I just changed job for the first time with good salary increase.

20 months later (March/April 2019) my total wealth reached 200k - so it took me less than half the time for the second 100k (but manage to get a second daughter)

Today, barely 16 months later, I cracked the 300k for the first time.

It’s meaningless - things are going up and down. People on various forums predicted a global crash since 2013, that never really happened. It’s possible now with Covid19 it will be tough, but we will see.

But is nice to see the “+100k” pace be always shorter - I wonder when 400k will come, I highly doubt market and my savings will propel me in less than another 16-20 months, but we will see.

This was meant as an encouragement to everybody at the beginning of their financial journey - you have the impression you are saving peanuts and nothing move. Is not true - you just need to be patient, which is incredibly difficult.
What helped me was to pick a really easy portfolio (I have only VT, and compensate therest of the world with VIAC), automate savings, and having a family. Once you have kids, you no longer stress over spreadsheet and market movements etc. Your days are so full (and fun, and sometimes angry/sad) that your attention shifts.

I basically went from 0 to 300k in 7 years, with an 80k salary in the first 3 years and ~110k avg salary in the other 4. My wife worked part time, so that helped but unfortunately is not factored in my calculation (~30k per year)
I could have done better, but I’m happy as it is. When the kids are finally out of child care and Kita I expect a boost in savings :smiley:

Be patient

Grog

21 Likes

That’s the right attitude. Congratulations on the progress made!

We had a topic on FI and happiness here.

How do you calculate your net worth? Including pillars 2 and 3?

Congrats, I have yet to see my networth growth picking up some pace but I’m also only tracking it since 2019.

yes absolutely. So that I can see my overall stock allocation, which by my plan should be 75% stocks/25% cash and 2nd pillar

Not considering 2nd pillar risk to have you overweight on cash and bonds

Thanks for sharing your story. Quite interesting to see the progression.

What’s your FIRE number? Do you plan to retire early?

2 Likes

Thanks for the story :slight_smile:

The crazy effect of the compounding. What is your rate of return on the VT?

Sometimes I don’t realize that’s reality as it’s just number on a screen, and have crazy ideas like buying a Ferrari to make it real :scream:

Thanks for sharing, this feels incredibly true:

I find it really hard when you have your financial plan drawn out to just accept that you now have to wait for it to get into motion and simply focus on other aspects of life. Thanks for the reminder that building other things and spending time with the people we love is what remains to be done to build the first 100K once the savings and investing plans are set up.

4 Likes

Hardly compounding. It‘s rather the effect of inflating stock prices.

3 Likes

When I started, I had no kids and was living in zurich with basically 2000 chf per month. I thought 1.5 mil was my number. Now I have 2 kids, and thought maybe 2 million would be fine. But my wife (we are not actually married, so we have kind of separate finance, we have a weird system that works extremely well and it is vey fair) love her job for the moment, so maybe I can retire early and she works?

Basically, I have no idea. I guess I’ll continue in my current job (that I love, and pays very well with little responsibilities) and go by gut feeling, market situation, our living arrangement (rent vs buy), my health and the one of my relatives.

The mindset of saving, building up safety through consequent savings is what is important.

Having said that, I mostly have a FIRE age in mind, not a FIRE number. With 50 years old I would like to retire, and make it work in any way possible.

I agree. That’s why the title refer to meaningless - is mostly stock growth

Well my investment plan is 75% stocks, 25% cash/2nd pillar/cashare.
So I can’t really reply to that question. I have variable bonus every 3 months as well. In general I think when I had a lower salary adn no kids I was putting 50%, now is more like 25-30%. But without accounting what my wife does.

This I can tell you from November 2014, when I started using IB to buy VT. I’ve tracked every deposit I made, and never took out any money, and 99% of it is VT.

I’ve deposited since Nov 2014: 131’583 chf
Now the portfolio has a value of: 174’384 chf, also +43k

using XIFF in google spreadsheet gives over deposit at various dates gives me an average return of 10.66%

Which I expect to fall sometime in the future.

2 Likes

I’m in the “trimming your expenses/getting out of debt” part and have undergone some new training aside from my job (to develop a side gig) so, right now, it isn’t that much (roughly 15%, most of it coming from the 13th salary). It’s going up next year due to less training expenses, a good chunk of paid off debt and reduced expenses (mainly rent) so that will be in the 30% range then, with still some good margin for improvement.

I’m not investing in VT, though. I’m a firm believer that we should exert our voting rights in GAs so I’m stock picking individual swiss stocks at the moment with the very few portion of money I have invested. I’d be very reluctant to invest in anything including US stocks because I don’t trust them to keep a stable policy regarding foreign (and Swiss in particular) access to their markets as well as taxation.

So, I’m very much at the very beginning of the journey. I know how I want to invest but I need to let time pump up my savings rate.