My grandfather retired in 1998 at 48 years old(around when I was born to help out), he had about $75k in an IRA and a pension that covered most of his expenses. He currently has $170k in a Roth IRA.
Since then he’s invested only in stocks (no bonds or ETFs), he mostly did short term trades until 5-7 years ago he started long term investing. The last 20 years he withdrew between $15-25k a year to help cover expenses.
He’s always talked to me about investing and taught me maybe half of what I know. It helped set me on a really solid path, but I never actually knew how well he did and he never tracked it. But yesterday I finally grew the balls to ask to check his Fidelity account and look at what its performance tracker says, he’s old now and literally didn’t know it had that feature.
So over the last 10 years he had annualized returns of 14.2%, the first couple years were a bit harder to gauge since he moved everything from a trad ira to a Roth IRA. But I got it down to 10.7% annualized over 27 years.
I see sp500 over that time annualized 9.02%, but the nasdaq (which is his preferred benchmark) is 11-12% I couldn’t get an exact number easily.
So he outperformed the sp500 but underperformed the nasdaq. I’d argue he did much better than he likely would have with an advisor (after fees) or even just following the normal 80/20 recommendation. So I think his performance is good. However, I don’t think it was *great* and likely when risk adjusted significantly underperformed.
Curious what others think as everyone here always says “well good luck maintaining that for 30 years” and I never see realistic posts of people’s 30 year return so I figured I’d share a real life example.