For those with portfolio >$1M, how long to go from $850K to $1M level?

[Sojourner]

If you've tracked the value of your investment portfolio (stocks, funds, IRA, 401k, bonds, CDs, cash, etc), can you post the length of time it took for the total value to increase from about $850K to $1M.  Also the dates or approximate dates if you can.

 

[Exflyboy]

I'm not sure of the value of your question as it is almost totally dependent on the market return at the time.

For example in 2013 the S&P returned 32% that year.. so if all your savings are in a S&P 500 ETF then.. 850*1.32 = $1.122M.. so less than one year.

If you had $850k in 2007, then it would have taken a heck of a lot longer..:)

[TN_Steve]

Which time?  :-)  It goes up, it goes down....

More seriously, the answer to this is going to vary dramatically depending upon the composition of your portfolio, whether (and to what extent) you are adding fresh funds to it, and what the overall markets are doing.  For example, on Jan. 9, 1998, the S&P was at 927.69.  On July 24, 1998, it was at 1140.80; thus, if you had 850K in January, it would have been at 1,045,263 in that time.  Then again, if you weren't adding money, you wouldn't have stayed there forever.  On October 4, 2002, S&P was at 800.58 and on March 6, 2009, it was at 683.38.

(I grant just using the index is lazy and misleads a bit because it ignores dividends and, more importantly,  influxes of money during the years.)

[sol]

I feel like this question can be most meaningfully answered with a calculation, rather than a collection of anecdotes.

$850k compounded monthly with a steady 7% annual return with no additional contributions would grow to $1mil in 29 months.

If you were adding $1k/month in new contributions and only getting 5% returns, it would take 32 months.

If you're a more typical mustachian of recent history, and you were putting in $5k/month and getting 15% returns, then it would only take 11 months.

I expect there are real people on this forum who could tell you each of those stories had unfolded for them, but I'm not sure how that would tell you anything more substantive than would just doing the math for yourself.

[MDM]

Took ~9 months - in 1997.  Rest assured it did not maintain that pace for the subsequent 18 years. ;)

[Sojourner]

Thanks for the responses.  No offense, but yeah, I was looking more for the personal experiences like Ihamo and MDM provided.

Thinking if folks had tracked their portfolio growth something like this guy, they could reply without too much effort:
https://goo.gl/LsQkTo
(link pasted from another member's thread)

[chasesfish]

I'm going through this right now (and adding a bunch to it every month), I'm seven months past $850,00 and now $21,000 away.   If we have a a week run where the market goes up 2.5%, I'll hit that magic number.  If the market stays flat, its going to be six months.

One thing you realize as you get a larger and larger portfolio is how much more investment returns matter compared to contributions. 

[arebelspy]

If you're a more typical mustachian of recent history, and you were putting in $5k/month and getting 15% returns, then it would only take 11 months.

I expect a lot of forum members have his experience over the last few years (850k->1MM in < 1 year).

Mine was 7 months (with holdings being real estate, with a small amount of leverage--about 30% LTV).

[JoJo]

Jan 2013 to May 2013.  A big portion of that growth was salary & bonus.

[catccc]

have you heard of networthshare.com or networthiq.com?  You can browse people's graphs.  I started using NWIQ in 2007 or so.  The support was horrible.  Too bad, I imagine the site could have made some money, but every year we had to beg whomever was running the site to add another year's worth of months into the dropdown.  So I haven't been there in a while and don't know what's become of it.  A NWIQ user saw that the site was just getting overrun with spam, and created NetWorthShare.com, and many of the dedicated NWIQ users moved onto that site.  The owner of NWS was kind enough to import historic data for users, so there is some history there.  You can sort profiles by amount and check out those over $1M.

I'm currently at around $610K, but I expect once I hit $850K, it will be a year or less to $1M.  I hope.

here is my NWS page:
https://www.networthshare.com/portfolio/sustainablesavings

[arebelspy]

I use NWIQ regularly (well..monthly).

It had a lot of downtime issues between 2012 and 2014, but has stabilized over the last year.

But you're right, it's basically an abandoned project.

How do I import to NWS--don't see that option anywhere?

EDIT: Never mind.  Found a forum thread: https://www.networthshare.com/forum/messages?TopicID=10  :)