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After three months, my $1,000 investment portfolio, nicknamed “Feemaggeddon,” is lagging. This portfolio is part of an investing challenge, the “Grow Your Dough Throwdown.” It’s a lighthearted competition featuring several top financial bloggers.

I have two goals with this portfolio. The first is to test a specific popular investing philosophy. Among those who offer advice about choosing stocks for investing, one oft-repeated technique involves investing in companies whose products the investor uses each day. That’s how I decided to create a portfolio consisting of Microsoft, Canon, Apple, Honda, and Samsung. I couldn’t invest directly in any of these companies except for Microsoft, but I chose good approximations for the others, as I explained in my initial investing challenge report.

Naked With Cash is an ongoing series at Consumerism Commentary in which readers share their households’ finances with other readers. These participants benefit from the accountability that comes from tracking their finances publicly and the feedback of the four expert Certified Financial Planners (CFPs).

For more information, read this introduction.

Naked With Cash is an ongoing series at Consumerism Commentary in which readers share their households’ finances with other readers. These participants benefit from the accountability that comes from tracking their finances publicly and the feedback of the four expert Certified Financial Planners (CFPs).

For more information, read this introduction.

Although I was tracking my net worth closely, I can’t pinpoint the exact moment my total net worth would have crossed into seven figures and someone might consider me a millionaire. It was something I wasn’t thinking about for a variety of reasons, but because I was an entrepreneur, I was the owner of a business that was increasing in value. It was difficult to assign a specific value to that business, but because I ended up selling that business — this website — the buyer and I both had to agree on a value.

Sometime before then, I also crossed the point of having a balance sheet that included investable (non-business) assets of a million dollars. One of the reasons I stopped publicly tracking my finances as I wasn’t interested in drawing attention to the fact. I tracked my finances to hold myself accountable for making better decisions with my money on a day-to-day basis; as my business grew, most daily decisions had little impact on my financial well-being.