EPT[Brag Blog] Personal Milestone Reached! - Page 3
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ziggurat
Canada847 Posts
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dAPhREAk
Nauru12397 Posts
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Burrfoot
United States1176 Posts
On September 05 2013 11:23 ziggurat wrote: Congratulations! Are you planning any more kids? Maybe, just going to let the seed fly and hope it lands in the right place right time + Show Spoiler + On September 05 2013 11:58 dAPhREAk wrote: how do you invest (outside of your 401k)? I had an etrade account opened for me back in 1997 with $1k for my birthday, then have a Bank of America account (merril lynch) because it had "free trades" offer. The first stock I ever bought with the $1k was DELL. My brother had just gotten a new dell for his trip to college and I was amazed at how much faster, better, cooler, awesomer it was than our aging 486dx2 and decided if i was going to invest in something DELL was going to be it! I held onto dell for less than a year, and sold it when it had jumped almost 50% and decided, dang! stock investing is easy - lets try a cheap stock and make some real money. After reading some random websites, decided on a stock called HOMS - homestore.com which seems alright. One of the casualties of the bubble afterwards, but it performed great, more than doubling my stock value. After selling HOMS, I was already in college and really didnt think or care about the stock market and invested a few more times in Dell, MSFT, and ORCL. I think I sold Dell finally a few years later and still hold a few k of MSFT and ORCL to this day. So etrade was the first real nest egg I had. I never paid taxes on any stock gains until after college so being a tax cheat helps! edit: memory fail | ||
GrandInquisitor
New York City13113 Posts
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dAPhREAk
Nauru12397 Posts
On September 05 2013 19:36 Burrfoot wrote: Maybe, just going to let the seed fly and hope it lands in the right place right time + Show Spoiler + I had an etrade account opened for me back in 1997 with $1k for my birthday, then have a Bank of America account (merril lynch) because it had "free trades" offer. The first stock I ever bought with the $1k was DELL. My brother had just gotten a new dell for his trip to college and I was amazed at how much faster, better, cooler, awesomer it was than our aging 486dx2 and decided if i was going to invest in something DELL was going to be it! I held onto dell for less than a year, and sold it when it had jumped almost 50% and decided, dang! stock investing is easy - lets try a cheap stock and make some real money. After reading some random websites, decided on a stock called HOMS - homestore.com which seems alright. One of the casualties of the bubble afterwards, but it performed great, more than doubling my stock value. After selling HOMS, I was already in college and really didnt think or care about the stock market and invested a few more times in Dell, MSFT, and ORCL. I think I sold Dell finally a few years later and still hold a few k of MSFT and ORCL to this day. So etrade was the first real nest egg I had. I never paid taxes on any stock gains until after college so being a tax cheat helps! edit: memory fail your chart makes it look like you made $500-600,000 on stocks. you are saying that you made that with only a few stock purchases? | ||
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Burrfoot
United States1176 Posts
On September 06 2013 05:25 dAPhREAk wrote: your chart makes it look like you made $500-600,000 on stocks. you are saying that you made that with only a few stock purchases? My anecdote was my stock experience before getting a job and any significant money - just playing with small potatoes before grad school. Back then I was more worried about the $15 trade order fee than anything. I think I graduated with ~$7k investment balance and was perfectly happy stuffing any extra money into a 5% + interest rate savings account or CD at the time. I only really started investing around 2005 when the interest rate dropped below 4% and all the extra cash I had lying about from being cheap and working overtime started to pile up. So every few months I'd invest 5, 10, 25k depending on how I felt about a stock - but only when I wasn't raiding in WoW. On September 06 2013 05:22 GrandInquisitor wrote: How do you track your finances? I use Mint but would like it better if I could design my own graphs over time. I use excel only really. Just record my portfolio balance at the end of each month and hope I'm diversified. I think I tried a few ios apps, even mint, but none really caught my eye. Most of the stock portfolio apps didn't allow for holding multiple positions of the same stock or just took too long to setup. I only trade using limit buys/sells so never had a real need for the trading apps either. So I just log the great majority of my financial life (expenses, taxes, audits, trips, maintenance, etc) into a giant excel file diary. Here is my diablo 3 excel diary for example: + Show Spoiler + ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/LekNwWLl.jpg) | ||
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