Time for the 2019 Grow Your Dough Challenge second quarter update! The Grow Your Dough Challenge involves putting $1000 into the investments of your choice via the investing platform of your choice at the beginning of the year. At the end of 12 months, we’ll see how the investments have progressed and which one can grow the most dough. For more in-depth details on the challenge and my investment choices, please read my first article about it.
My Grow Your Dough Challenge Summary
For the challenge, I made investments across six different investing platforms, plus a special bonus category of investing in myself through my blogs and YouTube channel. Below, you’ll find the countdown of my financial investments from the least amount of money in the account to the greatest amount of money in the account. Remember they all started at $1000, except Acorns, which I explain in that section. All account amounts were taken on Saturday, July 13, 2019 (while markets were closed). Also, I opened another account a couple weeks ago, this time with M1 Finance and started it off with $1000. I’ll give a quick update on that one too.
6. Robinhood
My Robinhood account is still down below the initial $1000 deposit, due to the investment choices that I made for the account when I opened it. I had tried to mimic the industry percentages of an S&P 500 fund and then chose companies representing those industries. My choice in the Consumer industry was Kraft Heinz (KHC), which I bought four shares of right before their share price dropped for a stone. I later sold those shares, losing $60 in the process. I am glad I sold them, because the share price is another couple dollars lower per share since then.
To represent the consumer industry and replace KHC, I then bought 3 shares of Penske Automotive Group (PAG) at $44.65 per share at the beginning of April. That price has been bouncing around right above my buy price for the last month.
After I had earned dividends in my Robinhood account following the most recent payouts in June, I was able to buy one share of another stock. I searched for stocks that were available for less than $20 and on July 2, I bought one share of American Eagle (AEO) at $16.40. This stock is trading near its 52-week low, but I can’t discern any company specific reason for this; their EPS grew by 4% when reported in June. It seems to be due to the general ebb and flow in the market since prices started dropping in May.
The current value of my Robinhood account is $989.57, down 1.04% from when I opened it in early February, but better than it was doing when I did my Q1 report. I am hoping it continues to recover.
If you are interested in opening up an account with Robinhood, please use my Robinhood Refer a Friend link.When you open your account, we will each receive a free stock. I received Sprint when I first opened my account. If you are interested in learning more about Robinhood, please check out my walkthrough video.
5. Capital One Certificate of Deposit
A quick check in on my Grow Your Dough baseline investing account now – my Capital One Certificate of Deposit that earns 2.7% APY. With the interest I have earned so far, the total value of the CD is currently $1011.09.
While Capital Ones does not have affiliate links for their CDs, Capital One does have an attractive Money Market account, currently with an interest rate of 2% on balances over $10,000. If you are interested in opening one of their 360 Money Market Accounts, 360 Checking Account, or 360 Savings Account, you can use this Refer A Friend link and you will receive a $25 cash bonus.
4. Fundrise
The crowd sourced real estate investing platform Fundrise is meant for a longer term investment time frame than one year, as many projects take more than one year to complete and earn revenue. Still, I wanted to see how it would do in comparison to more typical forms of investing. I plan to keep my Fundrise account longer than one year.
The account has been making steady progress and I am enjoying the updates on the real estate projects they are building. I recently received a Q2 dividend of $22.87, making the current value of my Fundrise account $1033.36.
If you open an account with Fundrise through my Fundrise Refer a Friend link, we will both have the .15% advisory fees waived for 90 days.
3. Lending Club
Lending Club is another longer term investment account, as loan lengths are 36 months or 60 months; I plan to stick with it with $1000 invested for a full five years. I like that I have invested the money and I can ignore this account as I have auto-reinvestment set up for the dividends. Though I did have to change my Note allocation last month as they decided to stop authorizing Grade E notes. I wrote about that in my article Lending Club Investment Adjusted.
I’m impressed with how well this account has been doing. The total account value in my Lending Club account is now at $1058.89 and it has an adjusted net annual return of 15.63%.
There is a Refer-A-Friend bonus for opening new Lending Club accounts, but the requirements are more rigid than some of the other investing platforms, so read the fine print. You will receive a monetary bonus depending on how much you invest in the account, but to get any bonus, you need to invest a minimum of $5000.
2. E*Trade
My E*Trade account is the one that most closely reflects my own investment style and I am pleased that it is doing fairly well. I’m not actively working this account to chase profits, but I had selected companies and funds with value that pay dividends and have the potential for growth.
The total value of my E*Trade account has dipped from its high last quarter, not quite recovering from the May market dip. However, it is still healthy with a current value of $1114.35, displaying a total gain of $90.41 or 8.87%.
1. Acorns
Acorns is an incremental saving and investing platform. Instead of putting $1000 in at the beginning of the year, I deposited $400 in my account. Then I began adding $50 per month at the end of February so that I will have purposely deposited $1000 in a 12 month span. The next largest portion of money in Acorns comes from round-ups to the next dollar on items I have purchased on my credit card or through my bank account. I’ve also used a 2x multiplier (so that if the item purchased was $14.25, instead of receiving 75 cents, $1.50 would be added to my Acorns account).
I have been making many purchases this quarter after switching to a cash rewards credit card with Bank of America, I have been using my card more often for purchases instead of using cash. This means that even more round-ups are being transferred over to Acorns. I have also opened two more credit card accounts, which I decided to not link to Acorns. I don’t use those other cards as often, but even though I am sometimes using them (and they are not part of the round-ups programs), I’m am still sending a greater number of round-ups to the Acorns account than in Q1. I also want to indicate that when you use your bank account as a debit account to pay for something, write checks, or even to transfer money to other accounts (such as external savings accounts), round-ups are also pulled out and transferred to Acorns. For example, when I send $130 per month to my son’s 529 plan from my linked bank account, $2 are transferred to Acorns. There is the ability to turn off the round-ups coming from the bank account, but since I started with it on, I’ll leave it on.
In this second quarter, my Acorns account has grown to a total value of $1118.92 and moves into first place on this list! I have purposely deposited $650 of that amount: $400 from the initial deposit and the rest from the recurring $50 deposits. The remainder of the increase in the account value is from my 2x Round-Ups being saved and dividends (which are reinvested) on my portfolio investments. The market gain on the account is 5.44% or when you subtract out fees (Acorns charges $1 per month to maintain the account), then the total gain is 4.97%.
If you would like to open an Acorns account, please use my Acorns Refer a Friend link and we will each receive $5 in our accounts.
M1 Finance
I had been hearing so much about M1 Finance recently that I decided to try the platform out for myself. I describe opening my account in my article M1 Finance Review: Open an Account and Get Started Investing and its accompanying YouTube video. After only a few weeks, the $1000 I invested has reached a total value of $1062.11 and the return is shown at 6.54%. This is mostly thanks to buying Nvidia (NVDA) during a dip and Disney (DIS) as it keeps climbing upward during the summer blockbuster season (thank you live-action Aladdin, Toy Story 4, and I expect, also the forthcoming re-tooled The Lion King). If I insert it in the list of the Grow Your Dough accounts I began at the end of January, even with this late start, it would rank at position 2.5!
M1 Finance has created a sweet referral bonus for the month of July. If you open and fund your account using the referral link, we will each receive $20 in our accounts, twice the normal referral amount!
BONUS – Me and My Blogs
I have dedicated $1000 to myself for growing my blogs and my YouTube channels over the next year and making improvements to content. I have another blog as well, You Make My World Rock, that I worked on for a couple years as a hobby, but had left dormant last year due to time constraints. I started working on it again at about the same time that Squintillions was created near the beginning of this year.
After going to WordCamp at the end of April, I learned that I needed to switch my blogs over from WordPress.com to WordPress.org to get the most benefit out of the platform. I began to use Bluehost as my service provider and the cost to get that set up and extend the ownerships on my two domains was $238.26. I learned so much from the WordCamp sessions, described in my post WordPress Conference Report – What I Learned at WordCamp Orange County 2019, that I decided to go to another one during my summer vacation. The upfront cost was $50 for the conference fee.
A new expense has been setting up ConvertKit for both of my blogs at $29 each per month. I’m not sure I’m going to continue with ConvertKit as I so far am not getting a corresponding value from it. I did view an online session from ConvertKit to improve my knowledge of how to use the service, but my sites are not getting enough traffic right now to warrant the monthly price. I will have to research a more cost effective alternative if things don’t pick up soon. Perhaps something will become clear at WordCamp.
My current total spending on personal and blog development is $745.18. Yes, there are costs involved in trying to create even a basic professional blog! I’m not seeing any income to diminish these costs and it seems like I will need to create a product to sell, rather than try to rely on nonexistent affiliate income.