Frequent contributor, Klaus Wentzel, mentioned that his dividend-driven portfolio was roughly +8.5% in 2025, after netting out the year’s living expenses. I’m watching the Sugar Bowl right now, so I thought I would add up how our portfolio ended the year. For benchmark’s sake, the S&P 500 was +16.6% (x-dividends) and the bond market (VBMFX) was +3.0%.

We finished the year with a pleasing +14.3% growth in our portfolio. Again, that is net of what we spent on living expenses for the year. I would guess our spending would be a 2.5pp drag on returns, so pretty close to where the S&P 500 ended up. I’m excited by that result, given that our portfolio is closer to 60% equities, 20% bonds/pension, 15% bonds, 5% cash/crypto.

In fact, 2025 looks like it is the absolute best year of the 10 years since I retired early. You can see from the graph below that our retirement portfolio is almost now 167% of where I expected we would be at this point (FIRE Forecast 2016). You can see that overall, our investments have had 3 solid years in a row. (In fact, up 6 of the last 7 years)!

One of the things that drove our investment strength this year is the sale of the rental townhouse that our son lived in. We paid cash for the townhouse 3 years ago when we bought it and re-invested most of that cash when we sold it. The stock market was still somewhat shaking from Trump’s Tariffs at that point, so we benefited from healthy growth as the market rebounded. (No, I’m still not a fan of the tariffs!)

How did your portfolio perform in 2025?

Image: Pixabay