10 Years of Investing | My Exact Portfolio & How Much I've Made 📈

I started investing 10 years ago with just $5 and absolutely zero investing knowledge, and since then I've built that into a six-figure portfolio. In this video, I'm going to walk you through exactly how I did it. So I'm going to show you which investing accounts I use, what I'm invested in, and exactly how much I have earned from dividends and market growth. If you're new here, hi, welcome, and thank you for clicking on this video. My name is Alyssa, I am 35 years old, and I started documenting my financial journey here on YouTube in 2023, partly to keep myself accountable, but also to show my journey as a bit of a late bloomer in finance. I didn't get serious about budgeting or investing until I was in my 30s, so I wanted to show that it's never too late to start and you don't have to be perfect or make a ton of money in order to start building wealth. For a long time, I had this belief that investing was only for rich people. I thought that you had to have thousands of dollars already lying around waiting to be invested. I didn't realize that it could be a slow process, and I also believed that if I didn't have thousands just laying around to invest that it wasn't even worth trying. I just assumed that I would never be wealthy because I just didn't see myself earning over six figures, and to this day I have never earned over six figures. That's a mindset that held me back for years, and I wish that I had come across a video like this 10 years ago. So before we get into my exact numbers, I wanted to share a little bit more about exactly how I got here and what my 10-year investing journey has looked like, because like I said, it certainly was not perfect. I didn't know what I was doing. I wasn't putting my money in the smartest investments 10 years ago, and I also lost a lot of valuable time for compounding growth. My hope in sharing my own journey is to hopefully help you avoid some of the mistakes that I made, but also to show the importance of starting investing early and consistently. And if you feel like you're already behind, I promise it's not too late. And obviously a huge disclaimer, I am not a financial advisor in any way. I am not advising to be invested in any of these funds that I'm invested in. I am simply sharing my journey, and I urge you all to do your own research and invest in a way that makes sense for you. Zeke has come to join us. Don't mind his little frog legs in the background. So my investing journey starts 10 years ago, but my working journey actually started about 19 years ago, when I was 16. That is when I got my first job. I was working at a fast food restaurant, and I was 20 years old. So from 16 to 20, I was working at restaurants part-time, and I don't believe I had any sort of access to a 401k, anything like that. And at that point, I had never heard of a Roth IRA, and I was not saving any money. I was spending all of my paychecks down to zero, which I think is a pretty common story for young adults these days, especially those of us who were not taught about saving and investing from our own parents and had to kind of figure it out on our own. So at 20 years old, that's when I got my first office job. That's when I started working full-time 40 hours a week, and I did have access to open a 401k, but I did not because I had asked a trusted source whether or not I should open a 401k. I didn't know anything about it, and this person told me that basically I think I misunderstood their advice, and I think they were advising me not to open a 401k if my company didn't offer a match, and instead like put that money elsewhere. And I think what they were implying is paying off debt or like maybe opening a Roth IRA instead, but all I heard from that conversation was it's not worth it to open a 401k if your company doesn't offer a match, which I won't even get into why that is not correct, and I should have opened one. But regardless, that's what my journey was. I did not open a 401k, and I was under that false belief for many years until my 30s. I thought that it was not worth it for me to open a 401k because I never worked for a company that offered a match. Outside of that, I also just had this belief that investing was for wealthy people, and I didn't even have the knowledge or the thought that I could be investing even though I don't have thousands of dollars laying around. So for many years, I just kind of lived like that. I spent my paychecks down to zero. I just assumed I would never be wealthy, and then I also believed that maybe at some point in the future, I would work for an employer who offered a match, and that's when I would finally open my 401k. But spoiler alert, that day never came. So in hindsight, waiting for the perfect circumstances or just feeling like I didn't have enough laying around to invest probably hurt my wealth building journey more than anything else. So fast forward five years, I'm now 25 years old, still no 401k or any investment accounts in general, but I start to get this feeling that I should be investing. I see my peers around me, they have 401ks, but I just I'm not really understanding what retirement is or like why you should be saving for retirement. I didn't understand the different accounts that were out there for me. I didn't understand how taxes factored in. I didn't understand like what number I should be aiming for, but I had always heard that you needed like a million plus dollars to be able to retire. And again, not having any sort of investing knowledge or knowledge of compound growth, I just kind of assumed, okay, I will never have a million dollars. That's just not for me. So I think I just kind of blocked out investing as something that would just never be part of my reality. But luckily during that time, that is when I came across the app Acorns. And if you're not familiar with Acorns, it's an app where you can link your debit cards and your credit cards. And then every purchase that you make goes through Acorns and they will round up your purchases to the next dollar and invest that spare change for you. And it's a robo-advisor. So you don't have to know exactly what you're doing or what to invest in. So this really appealed to me because it was the first time that I had knowledge of the fact that you didn't need thousands of dollars sitting around to be able to invest. And you also didn't have to know what you were doing. I could just throw my spare change into this app and it would invest for me. So I had mine set to deposit once my roundups hit five dollars. So my very first investment in 2015 was five dollars and seven cents into my Acorns account. In my first year, my Acorns account grew to six hundred five dollars and sixty three cents from my deposits and the gains that it was earning in dividends and market growth. So over the years, I kept investing my spare change into this account. This was still my only investing knowledge and I'm thankful that I had this account, but I was certainly not putting as much money as I would have knowing what I know today about investing in compound growth. But that's where I was at in my journey. I was investing my spare change and I would put little deposits of like twenty five or fifty dollars maybe every week or so. So by twenty eighteen, this account had grown to three thousand one hundred sixty nine dollars and fifty nine cents. And this was my only investment account until then. In January of twenty eighteen, I made my very first investment into crypto. And I say it a little disappointed like that because just knowing what I know now, I was not in a place back then to be investing in crypto. I should have been putting my money towards more tax advantaged accounts like a Roth IRA or a 401k. But alas, I only knew what I knew and I saw all the hype around it. And one of the apps that I use to transfer money to friends and family was called Cash App. And they had announced that you could very easily buy Bitcoin from their app. So that's what I did. I bought some Bitcoin for five hundred dollars at the time between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty. So I was about twenty eight to thirty years old during that time period. I was continuing to invest my spare change into acorns and doing those like twenty five to fifty dollars a week deposits. And then I just let my five hundred dollars of Bitcoin sit there because it was just kind of dwindling down during that time period. So by twenty twenty, my acorns account was up to nine thousand two hundred fifty six dollars and fifty four cents. But my Bitcoin was worth about three hundred dollars during this time. So five years into my investing journey, my portfolio was sitting at around nine thousand five hundred dollars and I was about to turn 30 years old. Then in early twenty twenty, my dad just kind of casually mentioned to me that if I didn't already have a Roth IRA, I should open one. I don't know if he had just learned about Roth IRAs during this time period or why he didn't share this with me before. But luckily, shortly after that, I started dabbling in finance YouTube and I was served an ad from Betterment. And if you don't know what Betterment is, they are another robo advisor account. They offer a few different financial services like checking savings accounts. And they also offer investment accounts like brokerages, Roth IRA and other retirement accounts. And that really resonated with me that they're another robo advisor. And again, I don't have to know exactly what I'm doing. I can just feed money into an account with them and they would be able to invest it for me. And I trusted that they knew what they were doing and that I would see a positive return on my investment. So in twenty twenty, just before I turned 30, I opened my Roth IRA with Betterment. And since I opened it in March, I was able to actually max it for the previous year. So I maxed it out for twenty nineteen, even though it was twenty twenty. And that max was six thousand dollars at the time. I didn't have enough extra income in twenty twenty to be able to max it out for that year. But every year since then, I have maxed it out and I have since transferred that account out of Betterment into Vanguard because I understand and I'm comfortable now investing in things myself and managing my own accounts. And I also don't have to pay the advisor fees that Betterment charges. Then in twenty twenty one, this is kind of random, but I opened a brokerage account with Public and that's just because they were offering some free promotion at the time. I think they probably still are, but you got a free stock when you signed up and deposited a certain amount. So I just thought, why not? What are the chances that maybe I got a really good stock? And I ended up getting just a three dollar Apple stock and I ended up investing in a couple of individual stocks, which I will walk through later. And spoiler alert, this is the only account where I've actually lost money. And I say it in quotes because I haven't realized those losses yet because I have not sold anything. But that account sits at a lower value than what I originally deposited into it. But we'll get into that later in the video. So between twenty twenty one and twenty twenty three, I was maxing out my Roth IRA and I was doing those micro investments into acorns. But I was also doing investments into crypto still. I was doing smaller weekly investments of twenty five to fifty dollars and then also a few larger investments, like a few hundred dollars at a time. And I should also mention that during that time I had switched to being self-employed. So I was now a ten eighty nine contractor and I no longer had access to open a 401k. And at that point I still did not know my options as a self-employed person about which retirement accounts were available to me. In twenty twenty three, I'm now about thirty three years old and I start getting really into personal finance YouTube and I start to understand the importance of saving and living below my means. So twenty twenty three is the year that I opened my IRA, which for those of you who don't know, it's basically like a 401k for self-employed people. And I invested nine thousand dollars into that. That year I also opened an HSA, which if you didn't know, you can actually invest what is in your HSA. So I opened an HSA and maxed it out, which that year was three thousand eight hundred fifty dollars. And on top of that, I maxed out my Roth IRA and I was also still contributing to my Acorns brokerage. So by the end of twenty twenty three, I had invested a total of twenty three thousand one hundred ninety one dollars and twenty four cents. And that was the most I had ever invested in a single year. Once I got into that habit of living below my means and investing as much as I possibly could, I set a huge goal last year in twenty twenty four to invest fifty thousand dollars. So to do that, I opened a solo 401k and that's another type of retirement account for self-employed people. I opened that because it offers higher contribution limits than my SEP IRA. So in twenty twenty four, I maxed out the employee side of that solo 401k. And that also helped me to take advantage of a lot of tax savings, which in turn helps you be able to invest more because you have more money in your pocket that is not going to taxes. So I did end up hitting that fifty thousand dollar investing goal last year and I invested a total of fifty thousand two hundred and fifty dollars. So now it is twenty twenty five. I am currently thirty five years old. I've been investing for ten years and I have a My original goal was forty five thousand dollars. I'm not sure that that is going to pan out this year. Hopefully I can invest at least forty thousand dollars and I plan on doing that by maxing out my solo 401k, maxing out my Roth IRA and also contributing to my brokerage accounts. So now let's break down each of my accounts. I'm going to share exactly what I'm invested in and how much I have earned in each account since it's been open. So here we are in my very first brokerage account, which is my acorns account. And I should preface this by saying all of these numbers are being pulled on August twenty fourth. Obviously, I'm going to be posting this video after then the market may go up or down. So these are my numbers as of August twenty fourth, twenty twenty five. And how I'm going to break down these numbers is I'm actually going to share exactly how much I deposited and then how much I gained in dividends that were then redeposited and then how much money I gained on top of that from market gains for the total value. So my return values that I'm going to be sharing are going to differ a little bit from what my accounts say just because they are factoring in the dividends as being my own deposits, which is true. Dividends are money that you earn from your investments. You get paid by holding certain shares every quarter or so. And then if you choose, you can just automatically reinvest those dividends into your investments or you could choose to just not automatically reinvest them and you could withdraw your dividend money as income. I personally just choose to have them automatically reinvested, but I like to show the differentiation between my own personal deposits and then money that was redeposited that was actually earned from my investments and then how much I gained from market gains on top of that. So that's how I am going to share these numbers today. This account is currently sitting at $29,175.23. Into this account, I have deposited $14,818.66 and I have earned $2,141.71 from dividends that were then reinvested and just pure market gains was $12,214.86 for a total growth of $14,356.57. So this account has seen a total growth of 97% from what I have deposited, which was that $14,000 figure. And like I said, this is going to be a little bit higher than what's shown here because these accounts are going to include dividends as part of your deposits and not count them as your growth, which makes total sense. I just like to break it down the way that I do to show you that your gains are actually more than what you think if you are automatically reinvesting your dividends. So now let's break down exactly what I am invested in. I did not choose these four stocks. These were automatically chosen by Acorns and what they do is a 70-30 split of US stocks versus international. So the international stock that they choose for your 30% is this iXUS fund and you can see that currently sits at about $9,000. And then these three ETFs here, IJR, IJH, and VOO, which most of you will probably be familiar with that one, these are all split between different sized US company stocks. So you can see my IJR is sitting at about $1,200. My medium company stocks, IJH, is sitting around $2,500 and then my VOO large company stocks are sitting over $16,300. And here we are in my other brokerage account, which is with Public and you can see that my current account value sits at $368.81. I will say this graph is going to look a little bit funky because back in 2023 when I started becoming more financially aware and realizing that I should be investing more, I did buy about, I think it was $1,200 or so of VOO in this account or maybe it was VTI. Anyway, I bought some of that and I made some gains on it and then realized that I'd rather just withdraw that and put that money into my Roth IRA or maybe it was my SEP IRA for the year. Actually, yeah, I think it was my SEP IRA so that I could take advantage of some tax savings instead of letting it just sit in here. So I did withdraw that and then pay the taxes on those gains and then that is now sitting in my SEP IRA. So yeah, just wanted to call out why this looks a little bit weird and why my numbers are going to be a lot more off with this account because this account is saying that I'm up $44.93, which is true as far as my overall net deposit and withdrawals because of investing in that VTI fund here. I did make some gains that brought this account to the positive, but for the purposes of this video, I'm actually going to negate this and just count this deposit as a deposit towards my SEP IRA and we're just going to go based off of the stocks that are currently sitting in this account and what I have made or lost from those, which I have lost money. So in this account, I deposited $445 and made $5.57 from dividends. So my gains were actually negative $81.76 for a total growth or loss of negative $76.19, which means I am down 17% in this account. So you can see I am invested in a little bit of Google, which I have gained. Let's see. So I spent about $100 on Google shares, which are now about $177. So that's good. I made about a 75% return there. I hold some Tesla that I bought for $20 and it's now $29.49. So I am up about 47% there. And then my $3 Apple stock is now over $5, so up about 68% there. And then my two losers. So first of all, I am invested in Coinbase, which I invested $200 in, and that is now worth $155.58, which is down about 22%. And then the big loser here is I invested in Virgin Galactic. I bought $125 worth of shares, which are now worth $1.11. So I'm down almost 100% there. Don't ask me why I invested in really any of these. Obviously, I didn't do my research. I just heard about them and thought they were cool and they tanked. So yeah, it just goes to show that maybe not the smartest to invest in individual stocks. If you don't know what you're doing, or if you're not willing to lose all of that money, I certainly didn't know what I was doing. And fortunately, I'm not too down in this account, but I am glad that I learned how to invest a little bit more smart for what I'm going for. I just want to build wealth surely and slowly. And I started investing in broad index funds that encompass the entire world stock market, which I will get into in the next sections when I share what I'm invested in, in my retirement accounts. Next, I'm going to walk you through my tax advantage retirement accounts, starting with my Roth IRA. And in all of these accounts, I follow what is called the Bogle head approach to investing. And this strategy emphasizes low cost diversified index funds, a long term buy and hold mindset, and minimizing fees and market timing. So it is a super simple strategy where you are just buying usually two or three funds that have you basically invested in the entire world. And the growth of your accounts basically follows the growth of the world stock market. So as you can see, my Roth IRA in Vanguard currently sits at $60,026.31. So you can see my performance since my portfolio has been in Vanguard. And keep in mind that I did transfer my Roth IRA from Betterment into Vanguard. So when I did that, I lost the data of how much gains I made when my Roth IRA was with Betterment. So Vanguard just counts my whole Roth IRA at the very beginning that I transferred as a deposit. But I went back and figured out how much I had gained while it was in Betterment. And I will share that I have deposited a total of $40,732.16. I have earned $2,917.18 from dividends. Overall market gains, I have gained $16,376.97 for total growth of $19,294.15, which is up 47%. So here is exactly what I'm invested in in my Roth IRA. You can see that I just hold two funds. I hold a U.S. stock market ETF called VTI. This follows the entire U.S. stock market. And then I hold an international stock market fund called VXUS. These are the two funds that I hold in all of my tax-advantaged retirement accounts. Again, that is following the Vogelhead method of investing. And I will be following that method until retirement because it is so simple and basically just follows the returns of the entire world market. With this approach, you're never going to have the highest returns, and you're never going to have the lowest returns. You're basically guaranteed like middle-of-the-road average returns, which is great for just putting in your money and letting it grow over time through the power of compound growth. And I personally like to do a 70-30 split of U.S. versus international. I think general guidelines for the Vogelhead approach is to be about 60-80% U.S. and then the rest international. And I should also mention that at this moment, I am choosing not to invest in bonds because I'm still pretty young. So my VTI is currently sitting at about $40,200 and my VXUS is currently sitting at about $19,800. Now let's hop over to my next account. Alright, so now we are in Schwab, which is where I hold the rest of my accounts. You can see in my HSA, I am invested in VTI and VXUS as per usual. So in my HSA, I have made a total of $7,875.89 in deposits. My dividends are $267.69 that I have earned. So total market gains, I've made $3,028.19 for total growth of $3,295.88, which is up 42%. So you can see my VTI is currently sitting at $8,808. My VXUS is at $2,340. I also hold onto this treasury fund that's basically like a money market fund. And it's basically like a high-yield savings account for any leftover cash that I have. So with Schwab, you can only buy full shares of ETFs. So I always end up with a little bit extra and this is just how I can ensure that I am maximizing my investments. So I currently have $22.76 in there. This account currently sits at $11,171.77. Now we are in my SEP IRA account that I also hold at Schwab. In this account, you can see again I'm invested in those same two funds, VTI and VXUS. And this account currently sits at $31,933.83. So I have deposited a total of $23,851.48. I have earned $750.44 from dividends. So in market gains, I have made $7,331.91 for a total growth of $8,082.35, which is 34% up. My VTI in this account is sitting at $19,385.56 and my VXUS sits at $12,517.98. And then I also have some cash sitting in this account that I don't have invested in that treasury fund. Lastly, here we are in my solo 401k and this is my newest account. So it's going to have the lowest gains in it because most of this money in the current account value I have deposited myself in the last year and a half or so. So you can see this account currently sits at $50,253.45. I have deposited $43,441. And in dividends, I have earned $529.42. Market gains, I've made $6,283.03 for a total growth of $6,812.45 and that is up about 16%. So again, I am invested in VTI and VXUS. My VTI currently sits at $38,816 and my VXUS currently sits at $11,420. Also, I should mention that while I do like to follow a 70-30 split of VTI versus VXUS, some of my accounts the percentages are going to ebb and flow a little bit because it just kind of depends like what time of the year and how much I'm investing in a given time that determines how much money I'm putting in each fund. And basically the goal is that my overall portfolio is 70% U.S. stocks and 30% international. So some of my accounts might be like 90% U.S. versus 10% international and other accounts might be more international. But as a whole in my overall portfolio, it's as close to 70-30 as I can get. You can see for example in this account, I'm at about 77% to 22% split and then I have some cash sitting in here as well, $16.79. And that is it for my tax advantaged accounts. So last but not least, let's go see my crypto account. And here we are in my crypto account. So I currently hold all of my crypto in Gemini and this is just a reminder that the blockchain is public. So that's why I'm going to blur the exact amounts just for my own privacy. But you can see that my account currently sits at over $26,000. And then here are all of the coins that I'm invested in. So you can see about 80% of my wallet is in Bitcoin. I own almost a fifth of a Bitcoin and that is currently valued at over $20,000. And then I have one-ish Ethereum coins and that's currently valued at over $4,800. And then I also hold some Dogecoin, over 800 Dogecoin, which is valued at over $180. I have over 5 million Shiba Inu coins currently valued over $60. And then I also hold some Bitcoin cash. I don't really know why, but currently hold almost a tenth in that and that's valued at over $40. So all in all, I have deposited into crypto $11,002.76 and I've made $15,423.28 on those deposits. So I am up 140%. So in summary, in the last 10 years, I have invested a total of $142,166.95 and I have earned $6,612.01 in dividends. And in market gains, I have gained $60,576.48 for overall total growth of $67,188.49, which is a growth of about 47%. And keep in mind that most of that investing happened just in the last two years, since 2023. That's when I got serious about investing and started investing as much as I possibly could. So that money hasn't even had that much time to compound yet. The biggest thing that I've learned in my journey is that you don't need thousands of dollars to start investing. You just have to start, even if it's with $5. And if you're feeling behind or just overwhelmed, I completely understand. I have totally been there. I used to think investing was just for rich people. I felt like I was already so far behind and that it wasn't even worth me trying to catch up because I never would. I felt like I missed my chance because I didn't start early enough. But that is just not true. Consistency matters more than perfection and you figure out things along the way. And every dollar that you put in today is something that your future self will thank you for. Your journey will probably look way different than mine and that's okay. We are all on our different paths and timelines. What really matters is just starting with whatever you can, wherever you're at. Even if it's small, it does add up over time and you can increase your investments over time as you're able to. Let me know in the comments where you're at in your own investing journey, whether you just began or you're a few decades in. I would love to hear about the growth that you have seen and the lessons that you have learned. And if you have any questions about the accounts that I mentioned or anything else that I covered in this video, let me know. I would be happy to answer them. Thank you so much if you stuck around to the end of this video. I really appreciate it. Please remember to give it a like and subscribe if you like videos like this and I will catch you all in my next video. Bye guys!