New year, same old stats. Here are the stats as of January 1, 2011.
SAVINGS: $39,157 (-$3,553 or 8.3%)
Christmas spending. Tuition bills. Moved some from savings to investments. Etc. Really not as bad as it looks.
INVESTMENTS: $27,819 (+$7,535 or 37.1%)
In accordance with my new investment plan I sold some stocks and bought some new ones. I also moved some money from my Roth IRA to a different investment account. This doesn’t really reflect market gains as much as new contributions, though the market did help a little.
RETIREMENT: $66,109 (+$4,821 or 7.9%)
The markets were very kind to our 401ks.
STUDENT LOANS: -$25,179
Slow and steady as always on this one.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
wow, thats a great jump in your investments! The student loan is always the pesky one that sticks around!
Congrats – you had a great December!
Did you read any particular book or blog to come up with your investment strategy? Are you using an online brokerage service to trade your stocks?
Hi Lola,
Yes, I’ve actually been following the progress over at http://www.crossingwallstreet.com for the last year or so and I’ve been pretty impressed with his returns and his blogging style. So I went ahead and just copied his buy list for this year. We’ll have to see what happens but he has a pretty good track record having beaten the market for the last four years or so.
And I’m now using Fidelity, mostly because that is where my retirement accounts are and it’s nice to have everything in one spot. I had been using Zecco for stocks because trades were only 4.50, but Fidelity finally brought their trading fees down (from 19.95 to 7.95) and since my strategy has now changed from more trades to just a few a year, it seemed worth it to switch.
Very interesting – I had never seen the crossingwallstreet site before, I’ll definitely have to follow his blog.