Year-End Monthly Financial Update – January 1, 2023

The Monthly Financial Update gives our readers an inside look at the allocation and performance of our investment portfolio. At the beginning of each month, we share a snapshot of our investments and highlight their performance over the previous month. In addition, we compute our progress towards achieving our retirement number.

Well, that didn’t go quite as we had planned. After many ups and downs (mostly downs), our portfolio ends 2022 with a negative overall year-over-year return. This is rather disheartening seeing as our goal for this year was to hit 150% of our retirement number. Unfortunately, the financial markets as well as the economy as a whole had other plans. While this setback will most likely force us to make some adjustments to our early retirement timeline, we won’t let this minor hiccup break our spirits! In truth, the fact that our portfolio has weathered the market swings relatively well is a promising sign for our future retirement plans.

On the bright side of things, our total portfolio didn’t shrink quite as much as the S&P 500, which fell by 19.44% in 2022!

While we didn’t reach all of our goals for 2022, we are not discouraged in the least. We know that by sticking to our investment strategy things will inevitably turn around. Therefore, our goals for 2023 will be the following:

Goals for 2023:
1. Continue saving and investing according to our plan
2. Purchase a home!! That's right, we're making the jump! A combination of wildly increasing rent payments--we had a $275 per month increase just this year!--paired with an expanding family (Baby GGD is on the way!), has led us to plans of buying our first home!

Results:
-4.21% month-over-month growth
113.7% of retirement number saved

2022 Total Net Worth Growth (Jan. 2022 - Jan. 2023) = -8.77%

Check out our detailed performance in the table below.