BEFORE I BEGIN, I EMPHASIZE THAT ALL OF WHAT I WRITE IS MY PERSONAL OPINION AND SHOULD NOT BE TAKEN AS FINANCIAL ADVICE. THAT SAID:
The Power of Compounding
If you put $100 into an account that pays 10% interest per year (compounded daily), then you would have $271.79 after 10 years, $738.70 after 20 years and $2,007.73 after 30 years.
If you put in $100 per month, every month, into an account that pays 10% interest per year (compounded daily), then you would have $20,886.71 after 10 years, 77,383.09 after 20 years and $230,935.16 after 30 years.
Don't take my word for it, go online to the US Government site for the US Securities and Exchange Commission at https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calculators/compound-interest-calculator
That's pretty cool. And you do NOTHING! If you have an account that charges you no fees to do this, such as Fidelity Investments, then all of the money in the account is yours less any taxes that are due.
So, how do you (1) shorten the time to grow the money, and how do you (2) deal with the taxes? These are 2 good questions.
With respect to the first question, even though a $100 per month seems like a lot now, over the span of 10, 20 and 30 years, you will most likely be able to contribute more. Furthermore, you can invest in a company that is growing faster than 10% per year. Over a 10 or more year span, many successful companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon that are both very large and have been around for decades, have grown over twice that rate. And again, don't take my word for it, go online. I use my iPhone and pull up the Stocks App. Then I select the "ALL" period at the far right above the chart. It shows the entire life of the stock, all split adjusted. Then I touch and hold the center of the chart and a blue vertical line appears with the stock price at a particular date. I then slide my finger to the far left and the earliest price and date for the stock are shown. In this fashion, I can pick any period spanning over 10 years and see how the stock did. So for an example, Apple gives a stock price of 11 cents on 01DEC84. The current price as of this post (the close of MO09OCT23) is $178.99. So the question is, what would the average annual compounded interest rate have to be for 11 cents to grow to $178.99 after 39 years without adding anything, just leaving your 11 cents in? Figuring that out is easy using a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) online calculator such as https://cagrcalculator.net/result/ For Apple, the answer is 20.9%, that's more than double the 10% rate used in the examples discussed above. For Tesla's entire 13 year stock life, the CAGR is 50.1%. Its chart is the one to the left in blue going from $1.33 13 years ago to 260 today, a growth of 195 times. Using the online CAGR calculator gives the 50% value. It's that easy!
Replacing the 10% used above with 20% and then 50% gives the following using the Government Interest Calculator used above:
For the one time $100 case:
At 20%: $738.50@10 years, $5,453.84@20 years, and $40,276.64@30 years
At 50%: $14,790,62@10 years, $2,187,625.18@20 years, and $323,563,384,54@30 years
For the monthly $100:
At 20%: $39,048.56@10 years, $326,684.06@20 years, $2,450,875.10@30 years
At 50%: $367,365.57@10 years, $54,688,229.44@20 years, $8,089,082,231.54@30 years
Notice that investing as little as $100 a month for 30 years makes you a billionaire, no lottery needed! For a young person with his first job at age 19, having 8 billion dollars at the age of 49 is nice! This is my favorite!
Using the Government Interest Calculator you can design a plan that best meets your goals. For example, for those of us who do not have 20 or 30 years, I would suggest starting with $10k and then paying $500/month for the first 5 years, and then $1k/month for the next 5 years using the Tesla 50% growth rate. The Government Interest Calculator gives a result of $2,044,720.93 in 10 years and $25,135,102.05 in 15 years by extending the second 5-year period for another 5 years at $1k/month. Starting with $100k and leaving all the other numbers the same gives $16,687,437.37 and $203,214,992.72 for 10 and 15 years respectively. Obviously the more money put in the earlier, gives the fastest and largest results.
With respect to the second question about taxes, this one is actually very simple. Don't sell your shares. Therefore, no tax. Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank considers his dollars as little soldiers working for him. These little soldiers generate wealth. So it is with Tesla shares. These little Tesla share soldiers generate, on the average, 50% per year. They have been doling so since they became publicly traded 13 years ago. So I would recommend that you NEVER sell these hard worker bees. Instead, borrow against them. Borrowing incurs ZERO tax. For example, say you have built up your Tesla stash to $500k, and you need an additional $50k to live. Just borrow $50k at 10% per year against your $500k in Tesla shares that are generating 50% per year. You're still 40% per year ahead. As your Tesla shares grow 50% year, you can borrow more. Eventually, 30 or 40 or 50 years from now you die with hundreds of billions in shares backing your loans of a few billion, and everything gets paid. You lived the life of a billionaire paying no taxes until after you die. I'm no tax expert, but they probably can figure out a way to minimize that as well.
I do have shares in a Roth IRA, but it makes no sense to sell these hard-working 50%-per-year soldiers. Regardless, I explain below the Roth IRA program, it does have limits based upon how much income you have. Of course, borrowing is not income.
Every American who has a job, is entitled to a Roth IRA account and can put $6.5k in it every year. ($7.5k if you're 50 or over) It is an Individual Retirement Account per the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, named after Delaware Republican Senator William Roth. It allowed only a $2k contribution per year when it started over 25 years ago and now in 2023 it allows $6.5k per year and is expected to grow even more! The amazing advantage of this type of IRA is that since you are putting in money for which you've already paid income taxes, ALL MONEY, that is, both contributed and growth, in your Roth IRA is TAX FREE and can be taken out TAX FREE after 5 years or the age of 59-1/2, whichever is later. Put in your annual $6.5k, earlier in the year is better, or, if necessary, set aside $541.67 per month for this purpose. Spouses don't even have to have a job to contribute as long as the other spouse has a job, then 2 Roth IRAs are allowed and can accept $541.67 in each account per month. Doing so in your 20s and 30s will practically guarantee becoming a MULTI-MILLIONAIRE AND FINANCIALLY INDEPENDENT in 20 years IF you invest in Tesla with stock symbol TSLA. Simply buy Tesla stock with the $6.5k you put in every year. After 10 years, you'll have $2.8M, and in 20 years, you'll have $426M, ALL TAX FREE. You'll be in your 40s or 50s and financially independent. And twice all of that for a married couple. It is hard to believe, but the numbers don't lie. For young people, a Roth IRA, especially with Tesla stock, is a “NO BRAINER.”
Why Tesla? Here’s the amazing Tesla story on why:
What we are witnessing is a once in history event. It is not a once in a generation event, it is a once in history event. It has never happened before and I do not believe that it will ever happen again. It is the "Perfect Storm." It is the right time, the right place, and the right man at the helm. Elon Musk is he man! He is barely getting started and already he is the world's richest man. He stated years ago that he expects Tesla to grow on the average over 50% into the foreseeable future. And it has!
And Tesla is just now doubling its number of factories. Don’t confuse a Tesla Gigafactory with the other car makers’ assembly plants. For example, Toyota has 67 assembly plants and makes 10M cars per year, or about an average of 150k cars per plant per year. A single Tesla Gigafactory can scale to millions of cars per year. Until 2022, there were only 2 of these technological marvels and this year’s production, primarily based on these 2 alone, is forecast to be about 2M cars which is 50% more than the production of last year, which was 50% more than the production of the previous year, and so forth. Every year a Tesla Gigafactory becomes more efficient. Now Tesla has 4 of them. Even advanced German engineering is no match in efficiency. VW takes 30 hours to produce each car. Tesla takes only 10 hours.
Monopolies are not dead. When it comes to smartphones (Apple) or the enterprise (Microsoft) or search (Google) or e-commerce (Amazon) there is virtually no competition. Each of these trillion-dollar American companies are effectively without competition and each dominates a particular industry which is now mature and reaching saturation. On the other hand, Tesla, another trillion-dollar company, is disrupting not one but at least 6 whole industries with opportunities that are far from saturated. For example there are 2 billion vehicles in the whole world, practically all of which are NOT electric and even at the rate of making millions of electric cars per year, it will take a very long while to saturate this market.
Six industries where Tesla, like the other trillion-dollar companies, has no real competition are (1) truly smart electric cars, semi-trucks, and their Gigafactories "the machine that makes the machine" since a Tesla Gigafactory is without peer with respect to production capacity (cars per year) and efficiency (hours per car) and is 3 times more profitable, (2) customized smart auto insurance, (3) renewable/sustainable energy generation & storage & arbitrage, (4) autonomous driving (robotaxis), (5) FSDaaS and AGIaaS (the licensing of Full Self Driving as a Service software and Artificial General Intelligence as a Service similar to Amazon Web Services), and (6) The Tesla humanoid robot: Optimus. Since these all leverage Tesla's lead in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), due to Tesla's fleet of 5 million cars collecting billions of miles of data every week, Tesla's lead in these areas is UNASSAILABLE. No amount of money can instantly create 5 million cars collecting and sending billions of miles of quality data that is needed to teach a Tesla-like EXAFLOP neural-net supercomputer (soon to be a 100EXAFLOP machine in 2024) AGI for autonomous driving and robotics.
The more you examine this phenomenon, the more outrageous it is and the greater the carnage will be for the status quo. Remember, Nokia, Blackberry, Kodak, Polaroid, Blockbuster, all were effective monopolies until they were quickly disrupted. Tesla's unique strength is its "pace of innovation," its engineering and efficiency. It is in its culture. Per Elon Musk, "The best part is no part, the best process is no process." Tesla is not a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, it is a once in HISTORY phenomenon. The other trillion-dollar success stories, were just the warm-up bands, amateurs! Tesla will be the world's largest company before the end of this decade. We truly live in an exciting time!
Always be aware that disruptors are feared and hated by those being disrupted since they will be forced to change into another endeavor. The media fears Elon Musk since he buys no advertising and in doing so shows those that do, that they should put their advertising dollars to better use by building better products. For example, GM spent $1.3B in advertising last year. They could have at least cut the cost of their cars by hundreds of dollars. In this respect Elon Musk and Donald Trump, another disruptor, are very much alike.
If you like, look into it yourselves. Google Elon Musk's "Master Plan" Parts 1 and 2 and 3. Watch the YouTube channels "Solving the Money Problem" and "Best in Tesla" and "Tesla Daily" and many more. Also watch Tesla’s “Battery Day”, “AI Day”, and most recently, "Investors' Day" videos or this recent interview for TED Talk: https://youtu.be/YRvf00NooN8 Or just follow my lead. I've watched them all.
I've studied this closely. As a National Science Fair winner, an MIT admittee, an MSEE, and an entrepreneur, my expertise is in this technology, and I have NO DOUBTS. I have put all my own money in this. I use Fidelity Investments. They are large, well-established and recognized, and charge no fees. Feel free to call me at 703.973.2631 anytime about this historic opportunity or anything else for that matter.
Thousands of “Teslanaires” have been made, and many more will be. Let’s join them!