Personal Rate of Return
« Previous Entries401(k) Just a Few Thousand Away From Previous High
Thursday, September 17th, 2009I was checking my wife’s 401(k) balance last night and noticed a couple of interesting things:
1. The balance is just a few thousand shy of its previous high-water mark. Yes, that number includes contributions but it’s still shows drastic improvement from the low.
2. Last year’s personal rate of return was somewhere around [...]
SURPRISE!!!!! Our Personal Rate of Return is 11.5% for 2009!
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009I logged into my wife’s 401(k) account this morning to find this:
The definition of personal rate of return (I put together a tutorial here) on Fidelity’s website is:
Your Personal Rate of Return is calculated with a time-weighted formula, widely used by financial analysts to calculate investment earnings. The calculated value reflects the result of your [...]
Question From a Reader – Am I Calculating My Returns Correctly?
Monday, November 10th, 2008This comment was left by Leland Holliday on an old post, Fun Math: How to Calculate Returns Using Monthly Data:
I used your method on each of the funds in my portfolio for YTD 2008 (thru 10/31/08). The results I got exactly matched the YTD values published in WSJ and on the Fidelity and Vanguard websites. [...]
What’s Better Than A 20% Return?
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008What could possibly be better than a 20% return on your money?? I’ll tell you, and it isn’t a gimmick.
Fidelity’s Year-to-Date Change Feature
Friday, May 4th, 2007My wife’s company moved their 401(k) to Fidelity in January 2001. For the most part, it was a good move. One feature that Fidelity has that I really like is the Year-to-Date Change screen that looks like this:
(If this were an anonymous blog, I would have no problem giving more details.)
Anyway, Fidelity started [...]
Question From a Reader – Calculating Returns
Wednesday, January 24th, 2007My How ‘Total Returns’ Are Calculated post received the following comment from a reader named Dan:
I get a little confused when I try to make these calculations to work with (1) purchases that occur at different times and (2) account fees. As an example of each:
- Suppose I buy somes shares in January. I earn [...]
Question From a Reader – Calculating Personal Rate of Return
Tuesday, January 16th, 2007I received the following question from a reader:
JLP,
Thank you for your site. I have found you present topics in easy to understand ways and also bring to light other sources of information that do the same.
I was reviewing your post on personal rate of return and I wanted to ask a question about 401Ks [...]
Figuring Your Personal Rate of Return
Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007The Finance Buff has a very interesting post that details a simple formula that you can use to estimate your personal rate of return. I blogged about this very topic last year but my formula was incredibly detailed and would be a major pain for most people to use. To compute FB’s formula, [...]
How Do You Calculate the Return on a Fixed Immediate Annuity?
Wednesday, June 28th, 2006I put together a pretty simple spreadsheet (download) that will tell you your rate of return on a fixed immediate annuity. This spreadsheet works best
How to Calculate Your Personal Rate of Return
Friday, April 28th, 2006Here’s how to use XIRR in Excel.
First off, I want to thank the guys at the Vanguard Diehards Forum (and this forum in particular) for helping me out with this project. The post I put up earlier this week was wrong. I was following an example I had found in this


