Hello!
Here we are, already at the halfway point of 2025, and it’s time for another update on my personal finance and investing journal.
For those new to the blog or this series, I focus on tracking my liquid savings and marketable investments in these posts. It serves as a personal journal, allowing me to reflect on my financial thoughts and progress toward my savings goals, while also acting as a “forcing function” to stay on top of things.
CURRENT PORTFOLIO
First, let’s dive into the investments. As of June 30, 2025, my marketable securities portfolio has reached approximately $647,000.
My overall allocation continues to be managed across a few key approaches:
- Value Based Asset Allocation: This remains my largest strategy, where I adjust stock exposure based on valuation and expected future returns, typically splitting between equivalents of major market ETFs (like SPY, VXF, and VXUS/EFA).
- Actively Participating in CAPITALISM: This portion includes my “Fun Fund” account, where I actively pick stocks. While I won’t detail specific moves in this quick mid-year update, I continue to look for compelling opportunities.
- VALUE + TREND: I also manage a segment of my portfolio based on a simplistic, systematic trend and value strategy, aiming for risk management when stocks appear expensive. I have been pretty pleased with this strategy. Not so much that the performance has been amazing but it has proven very easy to stick with and allows me to feel more settled with the rest of my portfolio. I have been allocating more to this strategy. I’m going to start publishing posts about the strategy and am working on a new page for those posts. I might even mess around with a Substack if there’s any interest.
These strategies continue to guide my portfolio as I work towards my goal of $1 million in invested assets.
STASH STATS
Now for the numbers:
- As of December 31, 2024, my investments stood at approximately $600,000.
- From the end of 2024 (December 31) to mid-year 2025 (June 30), my investment portfolio grew from $600,000 to approximately $647,000. This represents an increase of about 7.8% over the past six months, reflecting both continued savings and investment appreciation.
I’m still committed to automating my savings – it’s my primary strategy for managing behavior and limiting the willpower needed to stay on track. This consistent “pay myself first” approach remains crucial to my progress.
HOW FAST IS MY STASH GROWING?
I have slowed down my savings rate quite a bit over the couple of years. I consciously decided to loosen the purse strings a bit due to our newly larger family and a desire to try and make sure we are enjoying the trip.
My personal metric, tracking the percentage increase in the stash from both saving and investing, still shows solid progress for the first half of 2025. This odd metric reflects both levers I’m trying to pull (saving and investing). It is also simple for me to compute.
For the last five years (from June 30, 2020 to June 30, 2025) my invested assets have grown at an annualized rate of 20.28%. That is a little better than the last time I calculated it: 18.57% (for 12/31/2019 to 12/31/2024). It has dropped a little from when I computed it back in June 2024 (21.64%).
THAT’S A WRAP
It’s encouraging to see the stash continue to grow. I’ll keep swimming and will aim for another update as we close out the year. My next post/page is probably going to discuss my TREND + VALUE strategy and the related Fear and Greed portfolios.
Thanks for reading!