How I beat the MSCI World by over 21,000% over 13 years

Part 4: The financial challenges of a partnership and Kellogg's as a turning point

You can find the first part of my investment story (incl. background and TL;DR) here: https://getqu.in/JldknL/

The second part here: https://getqu.in/Ptei6g/

The third part here: https://getqu.in/sfTZ3P/

You already noticed it in part 3. This one was far less spectacular than parts 1 and 2, and that's a good thing. The donkey has to grow up at some point. And my girlfriend also contributed to this.

A portrait of my partner

My partner is a phenomenon. While I worked 40 hours a week and studied part-time, my girlfriend studied full-time and financed her studies with temporary jobs. And yet she was able to afford everything I was able to afford. 3 weeks vacation in the USA? No problem. A new cell phone? Of course. A gym subscription and membership of several sports clubs (without using them, of course)? Why not? Party every Friday and Saturday (with 40 hours a week and a part-time degree, that's really exhausting 🥲)? Definitely.

Honestly. I had and still have no idea how she did it. It's a complete mystery to me how she was able to finance such a life with her income. But she could. Perhaps it would be more instructive if she wrote posts on getquin instead of me? Pretty sure she would. But I'm afraid she'll take her secret to her grave (OF jokes & co incomming 😉).

Higher salary ...

In 2020, I was still living in my first apartment, the rent for which (500 euros warm) had never been increased. At the same time, our IT Director was a big fan of the donkey (no idea why, probably luck again) and promoted me, against the wishes of my direct superior and shortly before the Director was fired, with huge salary increases to just under 100k gross annual salary. My job only changed marginally. As I was still not living the high life, my already high savings rate grew even further. Until my partner took her first real job.

... and higher expenses

Do you remember? My partner could afford my lifestyle with her temporary job 😅. Kind of bitter, wasn't it? Now that she had a real salary, I got scared and anxious. And rightly so. Suddenly I was doing things with her that I'd never dared to dream of. Suddenly I was going on vacation several times a year. And not in the low season in cheap vacation apartments. No, now it had to be the high season and a hotel. Then there were crazy things like "just going to a restaurant for no reason" or buying good alcohol instead of the booze that was good enough the year before.

But the biggest turning point was the first apartment we shared. Normally, moving in together makes everything cheaper because you now divide everything by two. But because I was living so incredibly cheaply and we had to move to an expensive city because of her job, my share of the joint rent and therefore my living costs increased significantly. Thanks to corona, I was able to stay in my home office and didn't have to change jobs. My very good salary remained the same.

So my life became significantly more expensive. And I am infinitely grateful to my partner for that. She taught me to treat myself sometimes. I didn't know that before and it makes my life so much more worth living. Apart from that, that was of course complaining on a high level. Of course, you can also save a lot with an adjusted lifestyle in an expensive city like Stuttgart and an annual salary of 100k.

Kellogg's, the next turning point in my investment career

Over time, my investments became more mature. I continued to study finance in depth and developed my first real strategy. I went for a world ETF as a core, added a few sector ETFs as niches and supplemented my risky portfolio with my existing crypto positions and P2P loans. I also kept buying individual stocks based on my gut feeling and landed direct hits such as $MPW (-0.4%) or $YOU (+1.72%). So I wasn't quite all grown up after all.

And then came Kellogg's $K (+0.72%). I bought a few shares on impulse and found myself checking the price several times a day, constantly looking at the portfolio and generally feeling very tense. After about 8 weeks, I sold the position again with a few euros and a much calmer sleep as a profit. I questioned what had happened to me here and realized that I had not done enough research on the share. This created uncertainty and nervousness.

Somehow pretty crazy. I have 6 figures invested in crypto, but a 1,000 euro investment in Kellogg's makes me nervous 😅.

Anyway, I realized that you should understand what you're investing in. And that it can be expensive. However, it took some time to put this realization into practice. Until the 5th and final part of this series, to be precise.