re: How do you benchmark your Retirement performance?

Swab doesn’t include added money when calculating 3M, YTD, or 1 year. I know because I use it

I rolled over another account last year and it started including it when you look at the chart form where you can look at 1 month, 3 month, etc. Maybe on the website it’s different but in my app, it included it. If I look at the different tabs on my line graph where it says max, states almost 800%, but that is including the rollover lump sums.

Let me suggest this. Comparing your return to the S & P Index return might make you think that you are underperforming. I felt the same way each year upon learning the performance with several mutual funds that I owned because it was and remains such a popular benchmark used by the economists.

What truly matters is the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) which reflects actual dollars we lose or gain accounting for any withdrawals.

The S & P Index allocation doesn't likely match our portfolios if, for example, our portfolios are 60% stocks and 40% bonds and the S& P return is 10%. Our expected return including bonds is about 7.6%.

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Swab doesn’t include added money when calculating 3M, YTD, or 1 year. I know because I use it

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That's "time weighted return" which doesn't take into account contributions or withdrawals. This return is better used when comparing a stock/fund to another stock/fund.

To get a more accurate reflection of your personal investment performance, you should use "dollar weighted return". Which does take into account the timing of contributions. Fidelity can do this but I don't like the way they've implemented it. Also, Fidelity doesn't have all my data to calculate this correctly.

That's why I use a spreadsheet to track contributions/withdrawals by year across my entire portfolio. This lets me use XIRR to get a fairly accurate dollar weighted return for my portfolio for the last 17 years.

Also by keeping this in a spreadsheet, it doesn't if I move accounts from Fidelity to Schwab etc and that performance data gets lost.

https://thefinancebuff.com/personal-rate-of-return-dollar-weighted.html
https://starlightcapital.com/en/investor-education/mutual-fund-investments/twr-vs-mwr