Progress Report 2019 - for the rest of us.

[Jansen]

Since Ben so generously shared his data, I thought I would post mine as well.

iDeco
As mentioned in this post, I switched plans this year effectively erasing my history. Previously, I held a mixture of iFree NY DOW and some emerging market funds. Whatever I gained from the DOW was lost in the EM funds such that my account has been flat to negative between 2017 ~ 2019. Ever since September this year, I've switched to the new SBI Select plan and went all in on the S&P 500.



In May, I started logging the value every Friday night so I could chart the growth. It's quite the motivation booster.


NISA
This is how my NISA account has performed overall since 2017.


When I started NISA in 2017, I had just started reading the Bogle head guides so I thought I would give index funds a try, but I also wanted some tech stocks. So I split three ways between AAPL, VOO and TSLA. I later sold the TSLA for a small because I miscalculated my budget and needed the money.


In 2018, I had finished reading most of the Boglehead guides so I decided to use my NISA mainly for indexing.


After witnessing how strongly my tech stocks grew inside my taxed portfolio in 2018, I decided to switch strategies for 2019 and use my NISA allocation for tech stocks. Mainly AAPL, MSFT, AMZN and GOOG. Despite being the most recent year, this has been the most performant allocation yet.


Total portfolio
This is my entire stock portfolio including NISA. As you can see, my asset allocations are a little bit off.
I'm heavily biased towards the US Tech industry and my chips are essentially all in this basket. I totally understand the risks here. I've managed to control my emotions and continued buying in every month even during the short slump in Oct 2018 ~ Jan 2019 where my portfolio dipped into the red. I believe I should be able to handle it when another crash appears.


And it's growth this year.
To make the charts more useful, I should probably separate principal from gains/losses. I'll probably do that over the holidays.


My plans for 2020 are to continue my current trajectory, tech stocks in NISA, then a mostly even split of tech stocks and index funds in my taxed accounts.

[seb]

Hello,

Thank you for starting a thread like this. And congratulations on your progress!

My situation is still a bit messy, so my #1 achievement these last few months is getting started taking control of my finances.

My current situation:

I am "starting" with 130'000€ 99% in France. It's all money my grand-parents distribute to their children/grand-children in advance on inheritance. I have 50% of it in French "Assurance Vie" (~2.5% these days, but capital is guaranteed, so it's really safe place), and 50% in stocks/gold that are bringing almost nothing (losses and fees compensate gains).

I am preparing a self-managed investment account like I made with Rakuten Shoken in France, but it's quite hard to do it all from here as most banks require at least a French mobile phone number to send you security codes or 2FA systems. It's a work in progress, and I plan to slowly divest from the random stocks into French ETF. I plan on keeping Assurance Vie as a safety net, it could be a useful downpayment for a house if I return to Europe one day.

In Japan, I focused my effort on opening a Rakuten Shoken account in preparation to when I have savings :/ and lowering my expenses. I changed my mobile phone bill (SB => AEON, 7000¥/月 of savings), my internet (Nuro Sonet, 1000¥ for a year, then 4000¥ for highest speed internet, instead of 7500¥ today).

If my clients paid me on time, I would have had 2m yen of savings by the end of the year, but things are what they are, so I still leave paycheck to paycheck for now. Big projects ahead in 2020, with of course the big unknown of when I will actually see my money. I still prefer this life to having to commute to a company every day...

My goal is to FIRE in 13 years (before I reach 45). Whether I actually retire then is not decided, but that gives me a direction in terms of revenues and spending for the years ahead.

For 2020, I plan to pay myself 500,000¥ before tax, setup a GK for my activity, and save 2m¥+.

Happy holidays to all!
Sebastien

[TokyoWart]

Thanks for starting the thread. I think this provides a healthy opportunity to review how 2019 turned out financially as well as plan appropriate portfolio changes. I review my situation with these categories:

Savings
I saved right around 40% of my pre-tax salary in 2019 and carry no debt. This is the one thing I feel I have immediate control over and has been the most important tool for reaching financial independence.

Investment Allocation
My investable assets are split between brokerages in Japan (40%) and the US (60%). The Japanese accounts only hold Japanese stocks and are mostly my company’s stock (which I cannot sell) while the US accounts are about 93% US securities and ETF’s and 7% international index funds which only slightly overlap with Japan.

Investment Performance
My Japanese portfolio performance was only 9% which is below the market, mostly because my company stock, which is the majority of the portfolio, was down 3% (it had risen 30% in 2018) while my other Japanese holdings had a better-than-market performance which I am taking as the 18% TOPIX return. My US portfolios had a great year, up 40% largely because of old individual stock positions which outperformed the market. (In contrast during 2018 my US portfolios were down about 6%.) I am late in my career and have been investing for over 30 years and the absolute (total yen + dollar) gain in 2019 was by far the best I’ve experienced, several times greater than my after-tax income. I don’t expect anything nearly this good in 2020 but I have never been good at predicting the market.

What I Plan to Change
Over the longer term I have done better with my non-Japanese holdings so I plan to do more new investment in the Japanese portfolios, for which I am only re-investing dividends, in international index funds. For the US portfolios I put most new money into index funds and am concentrating on non-US international, international small-cap, US small-cap value, and emerging market index funds because they are under-represented in my portfolio.