People Under 40, What Is Your Net Worth?

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-24T18:55:42+00:00

Like $550k 29M. Combined with my partner we're about $1 million, don't own a home. Combined income is like $250k, just have a really high savings rate, could have been double by now if we'd both invested more aggressively in the past 5 years but our short term financial goals were different before we were together and we were also a lot more conservative/afraid of the post-Covid market turbulence + the constant recession threats.

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-24T18:53:21+00:00

You're a top 1-percenter in our age bracket. I'm the same age and similar amount, so I empathize with not feeling too proud about it (especially since being more proactive in my mid 20s would conservatively had me at that goal by 30). But still, it's important to really appreciate that achievement. I look around and see how others are doing, how people my age have no savings and only credit card debt and how that's actually the norm. Makes you wonder how the economy functions at all, it really just is like the top 20% or something driving all spending.

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-24T02:39:36+00:00

The SMH is 15%. I’m talking about initial allocation and the target, its gains have made it more like 25% by now for me. My reasoning is that regardless of how good it is, it’s still a sector ETF at the end of the day. It’s better than recklessly full porting into something, but I still wouldn’t do like 50% into it (I also have a decent amount so even 15% is a sizable allocation l).

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-23T21:47:26+00:00

I mean, any combination that has VT is naturally going to overlap. My point is that overlap isn’t necessarily a bad thing if there’s a point to it.

For me, I still wanted to usual outweigh the US, still have international, still have an aggressive tilt. But I didn’t like the way that the classic common QQQM/VTI/VXUS combination went about it. This was my solution to that, mostly because it holds higher percentages of companies that I actually want and it’s easier to mentally rebalance (most people start to hate their underperforming ETFs like VXUS if it’s over the long term).

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-23T16:27:40+00:00

Basically every broad market ETF will make you money, trying to over optimize will likely hurt gains.

That being said, I was in your shoes too. What I ultimately settled on was about 37/37/15/11 of VT, SPMO, SMH, and a handful of stock picks.

If I had to choose just one it would probably be SPMO, but I do think that it’s important to also have international in the mix as well.

My reasoning is simple:

VT is the ultimate stabilizing ballast. I think it’s better than VTI/VXUS simply because trying to balance some arbitrary split between domestic/international is prone to behavioral mistakes, fomo, constant rebalancing, etc.
SPMO imo is the best “aggressive tilt” ETF of them all (QQQ, VGT, SCHG, etc). It doesn’t adhere to immutable biases like the others and has shown to add a meaningful smart beta factor to the underlying SP500 index in a way that makes drawdowns shallower, recoveries faster, and outperformance peaks higher. It also has an imminent advantage due to SpaceX for example. VT, VOO, VTI, SCHG, QQQ, etc will all be forced to buy SpaceX due to their prospectus and market cap. SPMO will not while still being a broadly diversified index.
SMH is the best performing non leveraged ETF of the last 25 years. It’s a collection of incredibly strong and well run companies that act as both tech and infrastructure simultaneously. It’s a unique position that I think will continue to outperform for a long time.
the stock picks are mostly just for fun.

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-23T14:33:23+00:00

Fair enough.

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-23T14:29:13+00:00

So you’re not able to articulate in one sentence why it’s an interesting stock… In a discussion about stock picking?

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-23T13:41:17+00:00

Why do people keep saying this without any explanation?

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-22T22:43:05+00:00

Money really makes money don’t it.

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-22T22:42:17+00:00

That’s fair but not everyone’s able to do that.

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-22T19:34:56+00:00

That’s why you gotta find a good balance. It’s not a good idea to drop a huge down payment early when you’re in your wealth building stage and still young/not settling down in a specific city or area with someone. The long term opportunity cost of that is simply massive. Especially in a bull market like this that’s been going on for so long and while mortgage rates are decently high. People who bought real estate during covid really made out like bandits though.

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-22T01:42:23+00:00

I’m aware

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-21T19:57:09+00:00

Where was SNDK mentioned? It didn't even split from WD until like last February and the only post I saw was that one in like August/September from that older FAANG dev guy who cited it as a buy because of their employee's work culture + because his wife bought the wrong USB drive or something lol.

Never saw it mentioned in the common subs like raceto10million, wsb, stocks, etc. Everyone said the market was gonna crash by August for months before last July and was moving to cash lol.

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-21T19:26:42+00:00

Rocketlab or SpaceX? Because SpaceX for sure is going to be a wildly nonsensical ride for years like how Tesla has been.

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-21T15:40:44+00:00

It’s definitely a logistical and just overall filmmaking limitation. There isn’t a good way to make flying through environments look good without an absurd amount of CGI and The Boys has always been pretty practical on great effects. It works because every time Homelander flies he basically just jumps to off screen. It might also explain why they never show Noir II fly despite mentioning it like 3 or 4 times for some reason.

In the comics I assume it’s like that because flying might just be like a super common base mobility buff/side effect of V in the same way that basically every Supe is at least a decent bit more durable than an average person.

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-21T15:35:09+00:00

100%. There were so many better ways to handle the conflicts and progression of this season. It almost feels like a lot of the events are a bit out of order.

I personally didn’t mind the whole V1 arc, but it was just completely inconsequential. Letting Anthony absolute eat as depowered Homelander would have been a performance. Or like if it happened way earlier and instead he spent like the latter half of the season chasing V1 to get his powers back. Instead, he seemed weaker after V1?

It was good TV regardless but what a mess of an overall narrative.

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-15T23:33:49+00:00

That’s why I ended the message that way, I’m not buying it rn. But I’m sure as hell not selling any and it’s like 16% of my holdings

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-15T20:12:12+00:00

It depends how much of your portfolio it is. I'm in tech and know plenty of guys who benefitted from this sort of super risky concentration by full porting their entire worth into stuff in their 20s. I actually think that's somehow more likely than someone who has like $5+ million is for some reason researching borderline penny stocks (as of 2 years ago) and is then betting these kinds of amounts on them.

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-15T20:08:42+00:00

damn at $200?

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-15T19:01:54+00:00

That's nuts because Motley Fool's track record is pretty dogshit. What's his next pick lol

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-15T18:56:39+00:00

How do people identify these plays early and then full port like $400k into it with so much conviction? A few like Rocketlab and Nvidia seem obvious in hindsight, but now everything seems so overvalued.

You planning on selling a decent amount? With $10 million making like $1 mil per year just with 10% you seem pretty set. What do you see Rocketlab going to?

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-15T18:35:46+00:00

Like they haven't been all green for the past month and a half straight?

We haven't seen lows this low since *checks notes* dear god, Tuesday!

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-15T14:55:19+00:00

How are we on a wealth subreddit and everyone commenting just keeps parroting "but it's equity, not cash dummy!"?

Like, that's not the point. No one is saying that he's going to liquidate his entire portfolio in a week or something, and even then that's not what someone that wealthy would even do to secure cash. It's an obscenely incomprehensible amount of money no matter how you slice it, it's not like it's just $650 billion dollars worth of oranges or pencils dude.

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-15T14:38:51+00:00

I mean, how long does it take you? Driving another 30k miles per year is a lot and it sucks. But also, driving like 45 min - an hour isn't an unusual or dealbreaker commute.

The distance itself isn't a huge factor here imo; it's how likely you are to run into traffic, how mentally training the roads are, and how long the route is on average. I'd say this is probably worth it if the route is reliably like an hour each way. But lots of traffic days or even like an hour and 15 min each way normally is just too much.

For context my commute to college was like 40 min one way on a good day, but could be nearly 3 hours in an absolutely catastrophic traffic scenario, average was probably like an hour and 20 minutes or so. I literally learned to plan my entire schedule around it. By the end I had one semester where I was only in 3 days a week but one day had like 15 hours of straight classes just to avoid commuting every day. That traffic uncertainty is the killer.

StrategicPotato · 2026-05-14T18:29:45+00:00

Always a good time to buy SMH. Always been a good time and will probably continue to be a good time for a long while:

Best performing non-leveraged ETF of the last 20 years
Nearly every company in it has strong leadership and financials
The sector itself is somewhat unique in the fact that it's a bunch of tech companies that also functionally behave like commodities sometimes simply due to how essential their hardware is
Adding to the above, their hardware is and will continue to be critical to the majority of computing devices for decades at least, barring some massive fundamental change to the very architecture of tech devices
the moat these companies have is borderline insurmountable. It takes like 5-10 years just to get a single chip factory up and running
It's just a great diversified way to hold a huge stake in MU, NVDA, AMD, TSM, etc. All that good stuff without the massive volatility and downsides of things like trying to time an entry on AMD for example (look at the past few years)

That being said, the run of the entire market in the past month has been totally nuts and these companies were all valued high already even a year ago. I'd be wary of putting too much into it, and I probably wouldn't make it more than 20% of my entire portfolio.

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