To answer a few questions:
We contributed about $350K over the past 12 years, but much of it was not done on regular monthly intervals, and some years were much more than others (anywhere from $0 to $30K) in the taxable brokerage accounts, so I can't compute the rate of return without going through 12 years of trades in multiple accounts. The index funds to which we've contributed the most are the equivalents of the ETFs with symbols VOO, VIG, and VYM.
However, and I know this was risky and/or dumb, what really made the difference were some individual stocks. We opened our first taxable brokerage account in 2010 along with Roths at Vanguard. I remember spending any extra money on AMZN at $190 per share (pre-split), and we now have $253K worth of shares. $121K in AAPL, $62K in TSLA, $94K in CVX (which gives us well over $3K per year in dividends). We built these positions slowly between 2010 and today, but mostly between 2010 and 2014. There are smaller individual holdings, and not all have been winners (GE, Mattell, more recently Rivian), but the winners more than make up for the losers. Jack Bogle (and many others) would be horrified, but I'm okay with it for now. My thinking back then was that if all I invest in is index funds, I'm going to get the same return as everyone else in those funds (which would have been fine), and I wanted more, and in some cases it worked out (we spent less than 25K on AMZN, for example). I may eventually regret this.
The rest is in index funds and ETFs (and quite a bit left in several American Funds offerings from the old days when our 403b didn't have Vanguard funds). Just looked at our portfolio summary, it is down to 1.13 million (1.4 was peak). I wouldn't have been comfortable retiring with just the portfolio or with just the pension ($53,652 annually to start, then a complicated COLA), but the combination of the two helps me sleep well.
