I have been thinking about creating a blog on personal finance for a while. I decided to stop snoozing and take action. I have never done any blogging before and I am not even a good writer. But I’d rather regret the things I’ve done, than regret the things I haven’t tried. Hopefully one day, my 10-month-old boy grows up and finds this blog to trace my journey to financial freedom.
Personal finance is my favorite hobby and I have been investing for about 8 years now. However, I do something else for a living so I am not in a position to teach anyone about finance. I will simply focus on my own brokerage account that I created yesterday and update progress once a week. I hope to see it grow and achieve my financial freedom someday.
Goal
- Focus on long term growth
- Automate the investing process
- Once assets grow big enough, focus on passive income/dividends
Unless you are investing in mutual funds, most of the traditional stock brokers do not offer automatic investing when it comes to stocks and ETFs. I decided to try M1 Finance because you can buy fractional shares of stocks and ETFs of your choice and enables automatic investing, which aligns with my goal above.
An interesting feature in M1 Finance was that you can create your new pie, where you can add various different stocks and ETFs and adjust the percentage. You can also copy someone else’s pie and mimic their portfolios. They also provide some pre-built pies you can add to your portfolio.
Customizing pie was pretty fun and addicting. I spent a whole day researching and picking stocks I want to own (forever) and finally came up with my own pie!
After linking my bank, I set up my initial transfer of $3,500. I have set the one-time transfer late at night (It was after midnight) and I was surprised to see money was already transferred next morning and trading was done on the same day!
Here is a list of my stock choices and the percentages. I tried to pick between 20-30 stocks but there were just too many I like to own. I ended up picking 51.
Tech 40%
Consumer 16%
Health Care 14%
Finance 13%
Real Estate 7%
Basic Material 3%
Industrials 3%
Telecom 2%
Utilities 2%
Websites used
https://finviz.com/screener.ashx
https://seekingalpha.com/
https://finance.yahoo.com/
My Portfolio
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