The Road to Wealth (part 9— €95k): Muddling Through

My last update was in March, and a lot has happened since then. First, a quick summary of the past few updates:

1. In November 2021 I landed what I thought would be my dream job — an equity analyst position at a boutique investment firm.
2. In March I wrote a post where I concluded that the opposite was true — it was not a dream job at all. While equity analysis is still my passion, the work environment was awful, which was mostly to do with the people. (There was no vibe, as one might say.) I vowed then to find a new job.
3. When I told my boss that I wanted to leave because of the work culture, the response was — to my surprise — quite good. They offered to give everyone an extra working-from-home day, they implemented a whole lot of ‘comfort’ measures like free lunch; and they bumped up my salary by 25% to boot. They also vowed to make the place more sociable (as the lack of interaction and mentorship was one of my gripes). Naturally, I was flattered, and I took the offer.
4. Unfortunately, it only took a few months for me to realize that although more money and WFH days are nice, changing the atmosphere is more difficult, because it was not a matter of behavior, but a matter of different personalities being unable to get along. And it is very difficult to change one’s personality.
5. As such, I figured it was time to rip off the band-aid. I quit my job last week. That means I am now unemployed again, as I was in this post in September 2021.

Which is all well and good. I assume it takes a lot of trial and error before you find your actual dream job. Some people never do — and maybe the dream job doesn’t quite exist anyways. There will always be something you dislike. (Immer etwas, as the Germans have it.)

Anyways, not to worry. I just got to keep focused on the goal. That was the whole point of this Medium diary — to help me stay on the path, and to remind me of what I am actually trying to achieve here. The point is not to find a dream job — the point is to reach €200k in my personal investment portfolio.

So let’s get down to business.

The portfolio update:

Reminder: I started this journey to reach €200k in September 2021. The value of my portfolio then was €60k.

Currently, the value of my portfolio is €95k. This compares to €81k in March 2022 (i.e. 7 months ago). I am awfully close to the coveted €100k that I wanted to reach before 2023 as my sub-goal. An overview of the changes in the portfolio since that last post:

• The markets in general have been very weak. The S&P500 is down 25% YTD. However, as readers of my previous posts know, I do not invest in index trackers. Instead, I invest in a highly concentrated portfolio of individual stocks.
• The four stocks in my portfolio are as follows: three ‘long-term compounders’ which I believe are not just of high quality and with excellent long-term growth prospects, but are also reasonably valued; and one commodity stock.
• The three long-term compounders, which make up 75% of the portfolio, have been down slightly (~5% YTD on average). Fortunately, the commodity stock has done phenomenally well. Although it is just a small position, it has managed to compensate nearly the entirety of the losses in the other positions. As such, the portfolio is down only 0.5% YTD, outperforming the S&P500 by 24.5%.
• Since the portfolio is flat YTD, as well as since my last update, my increase in portfolio value must have come from savings.
• Indeed, the €14k increase that my portfolio saw since the last update in March is purely from savings. Roughly €2k per month for 7 months seems to explain it quite nicely, and is in line with my saving targets.
• I am hopeful that I will be able to reach my sub-goal of €100k this year, although being unemployed certainly does not help.

(Small note: I also currently have around $4k in cash savings that I need to cover my living expenses while I am unemployed. Depending on how fast I am able (and willing) to find a new job, I might be able to add that to my investment account. This would bring the total current amount to €99k. However, I am just going to assume that I will need the full €4k to pay for rent and food in the coming months.)

One concluding thought. Some people are urging me to hurry and find a job, because ‘it’s bad enough that you didn’t have anything lined up before you quit,’ ‘it looks bad on your resume,’ or ‘otherwise you’ll end up just sitting around all day’. I disagree profoundly with this advice.

I have plenty of savings to pay for expenses, and I also have some personal projects that I want to complete (finding 1–2 new stocks for the portfolio, exploring some programming ideas, as well as some physical fitness challenges).

These side projects will not make me any money immediately, but I have found that this type of prolonged ‘me-time’ is when I develop fastest. I read a lot, I try a lot of new things, I work on myself.

I have found that doing this once every while far outmatches any teachings learned on the job in terms of developing yourself.

(Assuming this ‘me-time’ doesn’t last too long, of course. One or two months is probably where the sweet spot is at.)

Besides, I think I have learned an important lesson from this whole experience: the quality of your job matters.

As an unemployed person, you have to jump through a lot of hoops in order to court a potential employer. This is just a fact of life, and as such I have no problems with it. But it also tends to manipulate your thinking into ‘I would be lucky to get this job’, which makes you forget that you also must place demands on your employer, not just the other way around. You spend a lot of time in the office, and it is important that you get something more than just money out of it.

For me, that something has to be happiness (or at least not misery) and knowledge. This time, I will be more thorough in my job search to make sure these things are in place. And, if necessary, I will take my sweet time looking.