And they mention Firecalc.
I just became a millionaire at age 35, and it's a huge letdown - Business Insider
I just became a millionaire at age 35, and it's a huge letdown - Business Insider
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wow, lots of hate in the comments - mostly sour grapes
good for the author
Accounts by anonymous bloggers often get filed under "to be taken with giant grain of salt."
Oh no. You mean these unsubstantiated accounts written on the internets by avatars using pseudonyms might not be entirely truthful and totally accurate? Say it isn't so.
Humerous article on reaching a million bucks
Hmmm. Can't figure out if my Humerus should be humored about a million bucks.
Alternatively there is a female in "Singlemuslim com" who may be intersted in a million bucks.
If I'm reading the second chart correctly, he doubled his money every three years and did so for over a decade. Hmmmm.
Maybe I'm overlooking something.
And they mention Firecalc.
I just became a millionaire at age 35, and it's a huge letdown - Business Insider
Did he say what single hot stock he put all his money into? It's possible, you know.
Now, after reading some of the comments here, you guys have me starting to question it! Initially, I couldn't read the date points on that graph because they were too fuzzy, but then I blew it up real big. Looks like it starts in April of 2006, goes in 2 month intervals, and ends at February 2015. And it looks like that graph starts at around $50K, and ends at the $1M mark.
In my own case, I had about $362K in April of 2006, and ended February at around $1,074K. So, while this guy's chart has gone up 20x over that period, mine has only gone up less than 3x.
Some of the trends in his graph are similar to mine, though. For instance, he shows a big jump from around Aug-Oct 2007. In my case, it was a jump from around $375K to $450K....about a 20% jump. However, August was a down month for me, where I lost about 10% compared to July.
Looks like his biggest drop was over the summer of 2011. I saw a similar drop, losing about 14% from 7/7/11 to 8/8/11. In those days, I kept track of peaks and valleys throughout the month, rather than just last-month data, so my own graph looks more volatile than one using simply month-end data would. However, to make it easier to compare over the years, I switched to month-end data starting in September 2011.
Oddly, the Great Recession doesn't seem so "great" on his graph. On mine, it's a big W-shaped monstrosity (I hit bottom around Thanksgiving '08, rebounded pretty nicely by January '09, but then cratered again in March '09). That little blip over the summer of '11 seemed to do more damage to him than the Great Recession did!
One area where I no doubt screwed myself up, compared to this guy, was that I started cashing out some investments in late 2012, and a lot more in 2013, when the market kept shooting up, to pay down the mortgage. I pulled out around $12K at the end of 2012, and close to $40K in 2013, most of that in the earlier part. The majority of 2013's run-up was later in the year, so I missed a bit of opportunity there.
As for my own journey from $100K to $1M, it took a bit longer than this guy. I first hit $100K in November of 2003. $1M came along in August of 2014. So, about 10 years, 9 months for me. I had a lot of help along the way though. Sold a condo in late 2004 and cleared about $76K. I also raided some home equity in the current home, and invested it. I'm not sure how much of the home equity went into investing though, as I went through a lot of phases of investing when the markets seemed down, but then paying down the HELOC when the rates went up, maxing the HELOC out during the Great Recession, and then paying down aggressively in 2012-13. My maximum limit was $175K, but with all the raiding, paying down, and buying other things, my accounting got messy.