Happy New Year! It is time for my personal finance journal update. I am just going to update savings/invested assets in this post and will work on another post updating total net worth and doing an annual review over the next several days. It takes a little bit longer to estimate my total net worth as I’ve got some real estate and deferred compensation to value.
All of the prior updates in this series are available on the Savings Diary page. The first, I’m Just Saving…Personal Finance Diary kind of provides the “origins story.”
Prior Update
In the October update (I skipped November), I ended the month at about $249,000. I had some unusual spending which offset my savings and market gains.
CURRENT PORTFOLIO
I remain “overweight” foreign stocks. See Media Pin of the Week – More GMO, Weekly Media Pin – Grantham on Graham, Best Foreign Value Factor ETFs, Resource Roundup: More CAPE, and Foreign Value Factor ETFs Update.
Overall, about 50% of my overall portfolio is allocated to non-U.S. domiciled stocks. In 2019, emerging market stocks (EEM) returned 18.40%. Developed foreign stocks (EAFE index) returned 22%. The S&P 500 returns 31.5%. Foreign stocks were up a bit more than U.S. stocks in December.
I also manage a bit of my portfolio based on a little systematic, trend and value strategy. The trend stuff is all long. I’m a little lower in stock exposure in the value based strategy.
Since my last update I sold my BRX position. I was up ~37% in the positions (REITS were up 25% in 2019). I have only reinvested a portion of the proceeds so far. I am looking at VIAC, EBAY, WFC, EXPE and some other options. I will put together a post or two around these decisions when I make them.
I calculated the annual return on the account with the BRX position (as i made no contributions it requires no effort). Maybe I will start tracking that annually (though the movement of EFA would dwarf the impact of this account/portfolio on my net worth). Anyhow, I did 77.92% in 2019 in that account. I’m going to hold up on launching my newsletter, however, as most of that was rebound from the 2018 end of year bloodbath. AVP, COTY, CAG, and BRX were all up a lot in 2019.
I did buy a little CBL with a small chunk of the BRX proceeds. CBL is a lower-tier mall/retail reit. There is an activist involved: Michael Ashner of Exeter Capital. CBL is a penny stock now. Basically the thesis is that it the equity is basically a stub/option on the survival of the business due to the large amount of debt in the capital structure. Management has some time to reinvest capital in redevelopment of properties prior to debt maturities and now Ashner is on the board helping impose some additional rationality. The first step was suspension of the dividend, they also sold a portion of an interest in an Atlanta shopping center for more than the market cap of the (highly levered) company. It is basically an option and I sized it accordingly.
THIS MONTH
I ended the month at $256,000. Nothing crazy happened on the income front. I did pay my property taxes of about $3K. My dear wife said I should also disclose to you that I bought a television for about $1,000. I got it on sale around Thanksgiving.
One of our sets finally died. I have been waiting for the OLED displays to come down in price, as I am kind of picky about displays (I still have a highly rated plasma, that is now in the bedroom). These new quantum dot LCD LED displays, however, are quite good.
I was going to get one of the new TCL sets, like this one (but from Costco, so I could easily return it, in case I got a bad panel). I ended up getting this Vizio, however, as it was brighter and worked better in my room. It is a bit of a panel lottery too (some of them show vertical bands in like fields of grass). Thus, it is probably better to pick one up from a place with a store nearby…maybe there is hope for brick and mortar retail after all.
As I’ve said, stocks were up a bunch and foreign stocks were up even more in December. Mr. Market essentially matched my contributions to increasing my liquid savings dollar for dollar in this update.
ONWARD
Happy New Year! It is pretty exciting to finish out 2019 over $250K. I am looking forward to the “Roaring 2020s.” I hope to reach FI in this decade. I suppose $300K would not be too much of a stretch goal for end of 2020, assuming some market returns. I am thinking about putting together some goals and maybe a post on them if they are interesting (six-pack abs?, dunking a basketball?). What goals are you setting for 2020 and the decade?