Blazing through the end of the summer and moving straight into a busy school year for my kids, time seems to be passing twice as fast as usual. I can barely believe it is already time for my 2019 Grow Your Dough Challenge third quarter update! I haven’t been checking on some of my accounts much, so some of the results of Q3 came as a surprise to me.
My Grow Your Dough Challenge Summary
For the uninitiated, 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. I invested in six different platforms, plus myself and my blog. Then in the summer, I added a seventh platform with all new investments, just for fun. All account amounts were taken on Tuesday, October 15, 2019 (while markets were closed). For more in-depth details on the challenge and my original investment choices, please read my first article about it.
7. Lending Club
My fears with Lending Club came true, as this account dropped into the bottom position this quarter. How did this investment get into trouble? It all started when I opened the account and selected the different level of notes to invest in. I put 20% of my investment in the riskiest level loans, Grade E notes, which had potential for the highest return. Also, I didn’t realize that I should have only invested the minimum of $25 into each note and I split my money into $100 lots. Of course, BOTH of my Grade E notes have since defaulted and are more than 31 days overdue on payment.
Lending Club stopped offering Grade E notes for investments in July, but I was already stuck with mine. I have put these notes up for sale on the Folio Investing Note Trader platform, in an attempt to get my initial investment back. I’m not sure if there would be interested buyers on these low grade loans that look like they may not be paid, since they currently are listed as 31+ to 120 days late on payment. Though who knows, some people like to speculate with their money for potential high returns.
Since opening the account, I have earned $88.68 in interest. The total account value in my Lending Club account is now at $939.57, with an adjusted net annual return of -8.7%. If I didn’t have the defaulted loans, I would otherwise be getting a net annual return of 13.75%!
6. Robinhood
My Robinhood account continues to bounce up and down below the initial $1000 deposit. When I chose the individual companies in this account I tried to mimic the industry percentages of an S&P 500 fund and then selected companies representing those industries. I currently hold shares in this account with the following ticker symbols: S, MXIM, LAZ, PFE, LEG, CIM, RWT, D, ABB, NYMT, PAG, and AEO.
I’m fairly convinced that I do not hold the secret for investing in great stocks when trying to pick fairly quickly across industries that I don’t have a lot of knowledge about; therefore, in my normal investing life, I continue to focus on dividend ETFs. Having said that, the losses could have been much more extreme and some of these companies are doing all right. Dominion Energy has been my best pick of the group in Robinhood, with the price increasing by about $10 per share or a 13.74% gain.
The current value of my Robinhood account is $987.06, down 1.29% from when I opened it in early February. I am hoping it recovers to break even by the end of the year.
I am excited about Robinhood’s recently announced cash management plan in which account holders can earn 2.05% interest on uninvested cash. Currently, I’m pretty far down on the waitlist for signing up for that – #316,369, but I won’t be adding any cash into the app until the Grow Your Dough challenge is over, so I don’t mind waiting.
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 (S) when I first opened my account.
5. Capital One Certificate of Deposit
Holding strong in 5th place is my Grow Your Dough baseline account – my Capital One Certificate of Deposit that earns 2.7% APY. I’m using this as a comparison of how keeping money in a traditionally stable investment compares with investing in the stock market and the other platforms. With the interest I have earned so far, the total value of the CD is currently $1017.91.
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. I plan to keep my Fundrise account longer than one year. In fact, I feel positive that I will commit some more of my money to this platform once the Grow Your Dough challenge is finished for this year.
The Fundrise account continues to make steady progress. I like the diversification of my investment money into real estate, which protects some of my wealth from the wider fluctuations of the stock market. The current value of my Fundrise account $1046.15.
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. You can see my full review of the Fundrise platform here.
3. M1 Finance
Late contender M1 Finance jumps into the number 3 spot in the challenge. I described opening my account in my article M1 Finance Review: Open an Account and Get Started Investing and its accompanying YouTube video. Opened in June 2019, the $1000 I invested has reached a total value of $1099.75 and the return is shown at 8.41%. This is mostly thanks to purchasing $300 worth of Nvidia (NVDA) shares when they were priced at $151.48 per share; the share price has since risen about $40 per share. You get an idea of how much better NVDA is doing than the other investments in the portfolio: DIS, CSB, or DON, where it’s piece of the pie is bulkier than the others in the image below. I have no intention of rebalancing that.
M1 Finance has a referral bonus, where if you open and fund your account using the referral link, we will each receive $10 in our accounts.
2. E*Trade
My E*Trade account is the one that most closely reflects my own investment style. 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. I am also thrilled with E*Trade’s recent announcement that they are offering online US-listed stock, ETF, and options trades commission free (though I don’t do options trading).
The best investment in this portfolio is General Mills (GIS), which is up more than $10 per share (a 20.78% increase) since I bought it. The total value of my E*Trade account is at $1127.01 and is displaying an unrealized gain of 8.57%.
1. Acorns
Fairly certain there is no stopping the growth of my Acorns account! Acorns is an incremental saving and investing platform. Instead of putting in $1000 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 now directly deposited $800 into the account: $400 from the initial deposit and the rest from the recurring $50 monthly 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. I made many purchases by credit card over the summer, particularly on my vacation. The market gain on the account is 5.10%, with a gain of $73.69 from the investment side of things since the account was opened, or when you subtract out fees (Acorns charges $1 per month to maintain the account), then the total gain is 4.55%. In this third quarter, my Acorns account has grown to a total value of $1518.38!
Now pondering what to do with this account when the challenge is over. I will probably drop the 2x multiplier, as there is much more money being transferred to this account outside of my estimates than I thought there would be. I’ll reset it to only round up the change. I am not sure if I will maintain the $50 transfer or not or possibly increase it. I like the steady gain on the investment of this account and it is showing better returns than being in a CD. However, it seems that in some instances it might be smarter to invest in some of the stocks and dividend ETFs that I’ve researched that continue to do well. Considering the dollar for dollar return, I’m doing much better with my choices in E*Trade and M1 Finance. The 2x round-ups in Acorns are skewing the results in favor of this account when I am looking at total amounts of cash.
Acorns is a nice platform for saving, especially for people who don’t have big chunks of money to transfer to savings at one time or who need the automation feature. If you would like to open an Acorns account and save your money incrementally, please use my Acorns Refer a Friend link and we will each receive $5 in our accounts.
BONUS – Me and My Blogs
I have dedicated $1000 to myself for growing my blogs and my YouTube channel over the next year and making improvements to my process and the 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.
One ongoing expense has been for ConvertKit for both of my blogs at $29 each per month. I am not seeing the results from using this at all and will be cancelling the subscription I have for it on my second blog, while I figure out how to use it here on Squintillions.
In September, I bought a tripod to use for recording my YouTube videos for the Squintillions channel. I got tired of piling up a stack of books each time I shot a video. Another reason for the purchase is that it will give me increased flexibility for recording in other locations besides my room. Excited to start use this when I record the video for this Grow Your Dough Q3 update.
My current total spending on personal development, blogs, and YouTube related expenses is $953.17. There are costs involved in trying to create even a basic blog and YouTube channel! I am still seeing zero monetary return on investment, which is disappointing at this stage. I have to acknowledge that I am not able to post as often as I would like to be doing so, as it is much more work than I was expecting regarding driving people to the site, and perhaps my content is too narrow in its appeal. Recording YouTube videos and editing them are still very time consuming, even this many months into my project. That is certainly frustrating, but I promise to continue to feature in-depth content, even if infrequently, as I hope that someone out there will benefit from my experiences and what I have learned.