How do you benchmark your Retirement performance?

I use the S&P 500 and include dividends

I’m at the age where there’s no such thing as retirement


I’m hoping I can invent something or get lucky somehow but I imagine I’ll keep working til I die

I have a spreadsheet where I track my overall portfolio performance across all my investment accounts (401k, ira, hsa, taxable). I use the XIRR function which takes into account timing of contributions/withdrawals.

I just updated the spreadsheet for 2024 and my portfolio had a return of 14.1% which I'm happy with. My portfolio isn't 100% S&P 500 so I don't expect to be similar to that.

What is your stock/bond allocation? For example, lets you were 70% stock and 30% bond. 70/30 using VTI and BND last year had a return of 17%. So that allocation performance could be a benchmark to compare against.

I plug all of my investments into a spreadsheet and track them throughout each month. That’s contributions, matching, and growth. For 2024, my accounts grew 30%.

I am 99.5% VTSAX/VTI.

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Sounds like I should be all in S&p 500 though.

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This actually gives you a lot of international exposure.

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Yeah supposedly I am "diversified" with dividend, growth, small cap, and international exposure. Sounds like I should be all in S&p 500 though.


My bonds are 20y so with rates changed in ability to sell that bond I gained nothing but will hold to maturity so should attribute roughly 5%

I am going to get out excel figure out what I am such a laggard on a&p 500

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I early retired 14 years ago, my main focus annual is how much money my wife and I can spend in the upcoming year without taking high risk. Portfolio was/is 60 - 65% equity and the rest is different forms of fixed income from short term to long term including a lot of 5 - 30 year TIPS and just under $150k in I-bonds etc. We have had very strong returns the past 2 years as I would imagine most have with similar equity exposure. Doubt I take SSI until 67 or later which will be quite awhile and my wife and I will be paying absurdly cheap joint health insurance premiums (< $8 per month) with tiny co-pays and $1,600 OOP max in 2025 on a Gold select plan. Waiting to see how much dim bulb Trump is going to frick things up for the middle to quasi-upper class Americans.

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I did 10% return last year so it feels like I under performed.

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10% was an under performance for the overall market in 2024, but that depends on where you are in life. Over 50, nothing wrong with that, under 50 you need to get more aggressive.

My 2024 was 26.06% overall, with my most conservative IRA doing 19.32%.

I turned 50 last year, so I looking to ride the roller coaster less

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I’m up 200% in 9 years since managing on my own after rolling over some 401ks into IRA

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How are you calculating that? For 2024 my portfolio returned 14%. That return was calculated using the XIRR function which takes into account the amount and date of new contributions.

If I look at just the balance from Jan 1 and compare to balance of Dec 31; my portfolio has grown 26%. However, to me that 14% is the number that is more important.

Looking at the balance from the start of 2016 till today, my portfolio is up 247%. That number is nice but it doesn't really tell me how my investments are doing. Since alot of that return is from the new contributions over the years.

From 2016, XIRR tells me that my portfolio has had an average annual return of 9.4% (or total return of 84.6%).