Real life investment (under?) performance

I’ve now been interested in personal finance, investing and FIRE since late 2007.  That’s a long time and means I still follow a number of what are now old school largely US based but still largely relevant for me forums.  Within these forums I have and am still continually hearing about how ‘great’ ‘recent’ times have been for investment portfolios.  In my own little RIT world times have been good, after all I’m now FIRE, but I wouldn’t describe investment returns as feeling like they’ve been great.  

Given I’ve been capturing my investing data in detail since I started I thought it was worth updating some parts of my spreadsheet that had fallen into decline to try and understand what is really going on with hard data rather than feelings.

Let’s firstly look at what my investment portfolio has looked like over the years as I’ve learnt what works for me.  I know it includes plenty of investing mistakes but importantly it’s my real life.

Click to enlarge, RIT investment portfolio over the years

FIRE 2.0

 Around this time last year, I raised a couple of questions in my update post:

• On the topic of the work I was doing I asked “Will I give it up and ever fully FIRE?”; and
• then in conclusion I reflected “…I’m now starting to wonder whether I actually needed the FI bit to make it happen or whether I just needed more courage way back in 2007.”

As it turns out the answer to the first question was YES and the answer to the second question was NO.  As I write this update, I’m now in my early 50’s, without paid work, feeling great and I think this might just be my second attempt at FIRE given I am yet to look for any paid employment.  Importantly, this time around it feels very different and I think that is for a few reasons:

• Previously I FIRE’d when I had ‘enough’ financially but in hindsight I had unfinished business in my professional paid work that I’ve since been able to allow to just dwindle away.
• That’s possibly because this time around while my paid work has been declining both in time and importance I’ve been building a life outside of that work.  Rather than retiring to dreams I’m retiring to tangible activities.  Not enough to fully fill the gap left by the paid work (yet) but enough to fill me up at this stage of life.
• This time around we’re going easy on ourselves.  Last time within a week I had left work, we had left our home, we had left our community and moved to the Med.  This time around we’ve made no physical changes other than to ramp up some non-work activities.
• Last time I was looking for my purpose in a single holy grail but this time around I’m gaining purpose from many different smaller things.