Year 2017 in Review

No. That's not a typo. I'm really going back to look at 2017 because I haven't had time or the energy to review my progress. The last yearly review was for 2016. I also plan on doing reviews for later years. 

Savings

This chart shows my 2017 portfolio value changes. 

Portfolio valuation and savings. The blue line is the value of my portfolio and the red line is cost of the portfolio, i.e., savings.

Let's look at the numbers for my portfolio cost and value in more detail in a table:

	31.12.2016	30.12.2017	change
cost (= savings)	66 585 euro	86 392 euro	+19 807 euro
value	89 189 euro	118 336 euro	+29 147 euro

Woot? So, during 2017 I managed to save an astonishing 19 807 euros (2016 was 16 127 euros, 2015 was 12 167 euros). I am really happy with that number. That's 1 651 euros per month.

During the year, my net income was about 46 245 (37 600 euros in 2016). The big gain in net income is mostly explained by me adjusting tax rates. I also got a raise that explain a couple grands of the amount but mostly I adjusted my withholding to be artificially low. Basically this means that I took a short-term investment loan from the government that I'll need to pay back next year. My savings rate ended up being the same 43% of net income as last year. 

Growth

But I'm even more happy with the next number, the value of my portfolio is up 29 147 euros during the year. That means that the market produced about 9 340 euros or about +9% in gains for me. In euros the gain was about the same as last year but percentage-wise last year was a bit better. But I'll gladly take 9% gains over a long period of time.

The below chart shows the TWR return calculation (in green, left axis) and the EUR/USD (in burgundy, right axis) currency rate. The TWR was quite smooth throughout the year, with most of the gains coming within the September to November timeframe. My portfolio is quite heavily weighted towards dollar nominated stuff so there's a definite correlation with the EUR/USD exchange rate as seen below.

TWR return calculation (in green, left scale) and the EUR/USD (in burgundy, right scale) currency rate.

Mortgage and net worth

During 2017 I also paid off 5 198 euros of my mortgage. There's still plenty left. As the Euribor rates are super low at the moment, I don't see any reason to contribute more than minimum to mortgage for the time being.

I can't tell yet if this will be considered an investment or not but if it were considered an investment, my total contributions to my net worth would be 25 005 euros or about 54% (2016 was 56% and 2015 was 46%) of my net income.

My net worth was up during the year about 31 750 euros to roughly 140 250 euros but I don't really track my net worth. I'm mostly interested in my money generating portfolio.

Conclusion

2017 was a good and busy year. I made a withholding tax trick that allowed me to put more towards savings. I might write about that in some later post. In the markets the year was a pretty good one with my portfolio making +9%. The TWR return shows a pretty boring chart, nothing major happened in the markets during 2017.

I achieved some new record numbers during 2017, including 90k in January, Six figures or 100k in May and 110k in October. All in all, I'm happy with 2017.