Grow Your Dough Challenge 2019 Q1 Update

Welcome to the 2019 Grow Your Dough Challenge first 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 detail on the challenge and my investment choices, please read my first article about it.

For the challenge, I made investments across six different investing platforms, plus a special bonus category. First, I’ll countdown the investments in the order of how they are doing financially, with the most successful one discussed last. All of the totals for the accounts were collected before trading hours on Thursday, April 11, 2019.

6. Acorns

Acorns is an incremental saving and investing platform. Now, maybe it isn’t fair to rank this one, as it is starting off with a handicap and has to make up extra ground. 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).

The performance of the investments in the market within my moderate-level portfolio also are a factor. The image above shows how the money in my portfolio is divided among various investment areas. Further more, there may be additional cash received from purchasing items through partner businesses and kickbacks from affiliate programs. I have only received a bonus for one referral so far. 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. Further, I have had $2 subtracted from my account for the monthly Acorns Subscription fee.

In the first quarter, my Acorns account has grown to $753.44. I have purposely deposited $500 of that amount. Most of the rest is from my 2x Round-Ups. I seem to be making quite a lot of purchases! I have gained 3.75% through the investment portion of the account, amounting to an increase of $27.26. Because I’m still under $1000, I ranked this one the lowest, however, in terms of the return, I could have ranked it 2nd. Next time, I’ll probably change the ranking to the investment gain per account, rather than the total amount.

Performance Graphic for my Acorns Account (Source: Acorns website)

5. Robinhood

I am really liking the simple usability of the Robinhood investing app and I don’t fault it for being down at number 5 in this list. That is due to my investment choices that I made for the account. I had tried to mimic the industry percentages of an S&P 500 fund and then chose companies representing those industries. It seemed like a stable strategy, but unfortunately, my choice in the Consumer industry was Kraft Heinz (KHC), which I bought four shares of before their share price dropped. I later ended up selling those shares, but lost $60 on those shares in the process. The good news is that I am not $60 down in my account, because I have received some dividends and some of the other stocks are pulling their weight.

I have not yet had anyone use the affiliate link I have for Robinhood, so if you don’t have an account yet and want to “vote for Robinhood” to increase it’s chances of moving up my leaderboard, use my Robinhood Refer a Friend link to open your account. When you open your account, we will each receive a free stock. I received Sprint when I first opened my account.

The current value of my Robinhood account is $973.50, down 2.65% from when I opened it in early February.

4. Capital One Certificate of Deposit

Yes, a 12 month CD in which I deposited $1000 is currently doing better than my stock market experiment in Robinhood. Not a whole lot to say about this, because this is a deposit it and forget it kind of investment. With the interest I have earned so far, the total value of the CD is $1004.31.

3. Fundrise

Fundrise is a crowd sourced real estate investment platform. It is meant for a longer term investment time frame, as many projects take more than one year to complete and earn revenue, but I thought I would see how it would do over the course of a year. I plan to keep my Fundrise account much longer. If you open an account with them through my Fundrise Refer a Friend link, we will both have the .15% advisory fees waived for 90 days.

The current value of my Fundrise account is $1009.38, with a total of $9.38 earned since opening the account at the beginning of February.

2. Lending Club

I must confess, I am surprised at Lending Club pulling into second place here, as this was the platform I was most wary of when distributing my money at the beginning of the challenge. I was worried about defaults on loans, but that has not been the case so far. Perhaps I haven’t been invested long enough for that to be an issue yet. This is another longer term investment, as loan lengths are 36 months or 60 months and I plan to stick with it with this $1000 invested for a full five years.

The total account value in my Lending Club account is $1021.30.

1. E*Trade

In the top spot is E*Trade! What makes me happy about this placement is that this account reflects how I typically choose my investments. It is reaffirming that it is leading my personal group of these different platforms and investment options for the challenge. I’m guessing that in comparison with other people taking part in the challenge, it is probably behind or on par with most of them. I’m not actively working this account to chase profits, but selected companies and funds with value that pay dividends and have the opportunity for some growth.

The total value of my E*Trade account is $1128.88, with a 11.88% total gain and an increase in value of $119.42.

Let’s look at some numbers here. When adding the total amount of money I have invested in the challenge so far (keeping in mind the incremental investing happening in Acorns), $5708.18, to my total earnings of investment dollars from all my challenge accounts, $164.63, I reach a total value in my accounts of $5827.81. This calculates to a 2.88% gain on my Grow Your Dough challenge investments. That’s better than the high interest savings account I have with Discover (2.1%) and the rate on my Capital One CD (2.7%).

The percentage gain is not better than if I had just invested $5708.18 in the S&P 500 index fund SWPPX on February 1, 2019 at $41.42 per share and kept it until the date I checked all my investments, April 11, 2019, when it was at $44.39 per share. The dollar gain there, with some rounding off, would be $409.20, equaling a 7.17% gain and a total of $6117.38. In this short time period, just dropping the money into that index fund would have been a better investment choice if one only had a few months to be invested; however, a couple of my investments (Fundrise and Lending Club) have low rates of return up front. We’ll see how this comparison of actual gain on the challenge accounts versus potential gain from the index fund changes as the year goes on. Will my investments be able to catch up?

BONUS – Me and My Blogs

I have dedicated $1000 to myself this year 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 as I was handling various life issues that ate away at my time. I completed a re-design of that site, have begun posting on it again over the last couple months, and have added a new section that will lend itself to posting more often.

So far I have spent $320.97 on my social media sites and my educational journey on blogging and creating videos. Besides the cost of setting up/upgrading the blogs with WordPress, part of that cost was for a logo for my other blog, and $50 was for an upcoming blogging event I will be attending: WordCamp. Soon I will be spending some more money for a microphone that will allow me to have better recorded sound quality for my YouTube videos, especially the tutorials that I walk through on my phone. I have tried to keep my educational costs to a minimum by reading advice from other bloggers and watching YouTube videos on how to accomplish the things I want to do. I have read a few useful books on content creation, using social media, and investing too. Another upcoming step is to switch to better video editing software as I am finding Windows Movie Maker to be too limiting in its functionality.

I have yet to make any money from blogging or doing YouTube apart from one Acorns referral bonus. The good news is that a few weeks ago I was approved to be an iTunes affiliate and this past weekend I was approved to be an Amazon affiliate. I am hopeful these two programs will get me started making some side income on these blogs, though the Squintillions site in particular doesn’t call for product links very often. I am also hoping that I will learn many useful tools and tips at WordCamp to help me improve the content and format of both my blogs, grow my number of site views, and add subscribers.

An extremely helpful book on learning how to get started on YouTube has been this one, YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and Making Money as a Video Influencer (yes, that is an affiliate link, yay!) by Sean Cannell and Benji Travis. I highly recommend the book and the accompanying videos on the Video Influencers YouTube channel for anyone getting started with their own channel. For example, I had no idea about Search Engine Optimization before I read this book. If you have had a YouTube channel for awhile and have kept on top of changes and features of the site, there probably isn’t much new material for you. While my goal is not focused on earning money or becoming a so-called video influencer (though it would certainly be nice to earn some cash or at least break even), I would like to reach a broad audience so that my videos can connect with the people who can learn something of value from them.