2 Year Post-Finale Follow Up

Last updated: June, 2021
Net Worth: $2,006,775
Change from May, 2020: +$777,524

Now, we have finally come to the end. The absolutely-final, no-more-to-come-after-this last post of this blog.

Another Year Gone

Sadly, COVID is still with us. At least now there is a vaccine. Everyone in my family is fully vaccinated and I am fortunate that no one I know got sick or died from it. It's looking like we are over the hump now and things are starting to open up again. People are planning trips once more, including us. After one and a half years of being away, we are finally returning to Las Vegas for our vacation tradition!

We were very lucky to be minimally impacted by the virus. Neither I nor my wife got laid off or even had our work hours reduced. We both switched to working from home full time and my daughter was able to attend school from home as well. Raises were cancelled at my wife's employer, but the virus was actually a huge boon for my employer. We had a record year in 2020 and we are doing even better this year. As a result, I actually got a significant 5-figure bonus for 2020!

All My Teslas Are Paid Off

My last car payment has been made! All our cars are now paid off! Last year, I thought it would take me 1.25 years to finish paying off the last loan and it took about 2 months less than that, partly due to that huge bonus I received.

Here is an accounting from the bank of the total interest I paid on the loan:

Had I paid off my loan on schedule, I would have paid a total of $5,682 in interest. However, I paid the loan off early, taking only 2.75 years to retire the 6 year loan. As a result, I ended up only paying $3,232.56 in interest. I received a $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit on my 2018 federal income tax for buying the car, so that means not only was my car loan free, I came out ahead by $4,267.44. Not bad.

The Tesla Is Still Amazing

It's now been almost three years of ownership and I still love the car. At the end of 2020, we made a second road trip from Washington to Arizona, just like the one I did at the end of 2018. We took the same basic route and stopped at most of the same charging stations.

Much has changed in the two years since our last trip. First, there are a lot more Teslas on the road these days. Second, I noticed many improvements to the charging network. Some of the locations have been expanded with more chargers and some had the new faster V3 chargers installed. And, of course, there are more charging locations in general.

In fact, I've noticed almost all of the Safeway grocery stores near me have installed one or two free electric vehicle chargers in their parking lots. They are level 2, non-Tesla chargers, which means they are somewhat slow and require an adapter for me to use, but free energy is free energy! I can usually gain about a 5% charge while I do my weekly grocery shopping.

Three Years Old And Going Strong

The car has performed admirably for the three years I've been an owner. I currently have 35,173 miles on the car. That's somewhat low for a 3 year old car, mainly because with COVID, I haven't been driving to work at all. Or driving anywhere, really.

The car was rated by the EPA as using 350 Wh/mi (or 35 kWh/100 miles, as their website lists it). As the below image from the car's odometer shows, I'm actually getting 342 Wh/mi over the life of the car. For this statistic, lower is better, so I'm actually coming out ahead of the official estimate.

Maintenance costs are just about non-existent. Apart from getting it washed, I can't even think of any maintenance I had done. Not routine maintenance, anyway. I have yet to even rotate the tires!

Oops. Turns out, that's not true. I had them rotated once, at 6,250 miles. At the time, that was Tesla's recommended guidance. Since then, the official guidance from Tesla for their dual motor vehicles has changed and they now say that the tires only need to be rotated if the tread difference between the front and rear tires is 2/32 of an inch or more (with the rear having less). That hasn't happened yet. I also still have a fair amount of tread left on the tires, although I can see they are wearing. I will probably need to replace them in another 15,000 miles or so.

Total maintenance costs so far: $68 plus tax.

Which isn't to say I haven't spent money on the car. As the above linked-to post shows, I did scrape my wheel once and had to have that repaired at a cost of $350. My paint was also chipped by a flying rock, so I spent $100 on a Tesla paint repair kit to fix that. Apart from car washes, I can't think of any other maintenance-ish things I've had to pay for.

I'm eagerly awaiting the release of the Full Self-Driving functionality, which I purchased when I bought the car. Autopilot has seen vast improvements during my ownership and, from what I've been reading, FSD should perform even better.

Some Interviews

During the past year, I did a couple of interviews for the ESI Money blog. I was Number11 in their Six Figure Interview series and was Millionaire Interview #237 in the Millionaire Interview series.

Investment Performance

My stock portfolio has recovered from the initial COVID drop and has continued to grow.

That chart perfectly illustrates why it's important to practice buy-and-hold in the stock market and not panic sell. Despite my big loss at the beginning of the COVID pandemic in March 2020, by August 2020, the market had recovered. Not only did it recover, but it continued to rise and I'm now at an all-time high.

But it wasn't just not selling and letting the market recover that helped my portfolio performance. I continued to invest and buy stocks during the downturn. This let me buy at depressed prices and, when the market did recover, it supercharged my growth.

Net Worth

May 2020		June 2021

Our net worth took off over this past year, growing by over $750,000! We have surpassed a net worth of $2 million dollars! Amazing. If I wasn't looking at the numbers myself, I would not believe it.

As the above figures show, the growth was mainly fueled by investment gains, but around $60,000 was due to the property value increase of my house. I also paid down over $85,000 in loans. Some of that was principal repayment on my mortgage, but most of that was my car loan. In May 2020, I owed $72,000 on my Model S. Thirteen months later, I owe nothing.

As I previously mentioned, the huge drop in my stock portfolio from when COVID first hit has more than been made up. And with our final car loan paid off, I'm going to be redirecting that money towards investments and paying down our mortgage, so I expect our net worth to continue to grow, possibly even faster.

I first started tracking my net worth in March, 2016. At that time, it was $621,556.05. Now, five years later, it's more than tripled. Not bad!

So as we come out of COVID isolation and life starts to return to normal, things are looking bright. 

Thanks for reading!

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