The year has closed and it’s been a huge year for markets – let’s wrap up how the quarter went and the year in general!

Crypto

Bitcoin continued to make new highs during the quarter, finally breaching the 100k mark.

Bitcoin bottomed during early 2023, as I predicted it would in this analysis, and I still think it has a good chance to reach the $200k mark by the end of 2025, which I also laid out in the same analysis.

If historic trends continue to play out, 2025 should be a very big year for crypto.

The currently allocation of the portfolio to Bitcoin is pretty high, as I moved some of the idle cash into a Bitcoin ETF, as well as the portfolio’s core Bitcoin holding, so at the moment Bitcoin exposure is around 33%.

However it’s important to note I didn’t allocate 33% – the weighting has simply grown as Bitcoin has rallied and I haven’t rebalanced (and don’t plan to).

Every month I add a small amount of Bitcoin to the public portfolio using Easy Crypto.

You can read my guide on how to get started investing in Bitcoin here.

Right now the public portfolio owns approximately 0.3 Bitcoin, constituting 20% of the portfolio.

Stocks

Stocks continue to look expensive to me across the board and I haven’t seen anything particularly compelling.

Probably the best deals I’m seeing these days are Chinese stocks, particularly Alibaba and JD.

The public portfolio already has an Alibaba position, opened back in 2021, which is down about 20%. Obviously I have no plans to sell as I think it’s clearly undervalued at the current price, if I had some USD I would probably add to it, but I’m refraining from buying USD right now since the exchange rate is so awful.

As for NZ stocks nothing looks exciting to me. I’ve added slowly to my Summerset position, which I still think is the clear leader in the retirement care industry and I think that industry will do well. Unfortunately New Zealand’s economy doesn’t look very optimistic, and neither does its sharemarket. Still some good dividend payers and I’ve got a few of those, but overall Bitcoin just appears superior to me from almost every angle.

Cash

The portfolio holds significant cash – around $20k, or 13%.

Two reasons for this:

• There are no NZ stocks that look good enough value to move the cash into
• The NZ/US exchange rate is too crappy to exchange it to buy something else

I also think it’s prudent to have some cash on hand in case things go pear-shaped and you have ammo to make a move.

Buffett has been stockpiling cash for almost two years now, and he rarely turns out to be wrong.

I’ll continue to keep a cash position until I find a compelling way to deploy it.

Year in Review

The nature of the project has definitely changed a lot.

Now that the portfolio is of a decent size, I’ve taken the investments more seriously and removed a lot of the “play-around” investments I was doing back when the portfolio started in 2020.

For example, every Friday I would make an IG story of things like “Should I buy Coke or Pepsi?” and would then go and buy $10 of the stock of whoever won the most votes.

The idea of those stories was to break the stigma that buying stocks was really complicated and encourage everyone to go start their own portfolios.

Now that we’re dealing with almost $200k of capital I try to make portfolio decisions properly and have since sold all those mini $10 investments (there were a lot!).

It’s also at the stage where I don’t spend much (or any) time on side hustling anymore, since the whole purpose of those was to show people how to generate capital for their portfolios, and to make content around the process.

Believe it or not, I genuinely was not doing those things to make money for me, but as a teaching tool for all you readers to give you a process to follow. Even selling the courses was not to make money for me, but again to give a demonstration on how to create and sell a product. The making money side of it didn’t hurt obviously, and I’m always just as happy to bank profits as the next person, but none of that was about me trying to make money or monetize the following.

Now that it’s been successfully done (I hope) and there’s enough content on here for you to learn everything, I’ve no interest in spending more time on it, because there’s no need to! Could I start another side hustle and start adding another $5k a month to the portfolio? Yeah probably, but it would be a lot of work, and I have much easier ways to make $5k outside of moneybren, so naturally that’s where I spend most of my time.

Moneybren started as a side project, something to do for fun, and I want to keep it fun so it stays alive. Managing the portfolio is fun, shitposting on the Insta page is fun, making posts is fun, talking to readers is fun, so I continue to do those things. Spending all night researching products to flip on Aliexpress and then listing them all on Trademe and keeping inventory to make an extra $500/mth to show people how flipping works is not really fun to me (at least not anymore), so I’ve no plans to continue doing things like that.

Luckily there are a few side hustles we did that still earn passively, like the niche sites, and those bring in an odd $200 or $500 here and there, which gives the portfolio a boost. Also this blog has affiliate links scattered through it and over 100 articles, so they all contribute to new portfolio capital too every month.

In 2025 I expect the portfolio to keep ticking along, but from now on most of the portfolio gains should come from investment gains, not new capital.

As for performance during the year, I think we did well and more importantly, helped a lot of other Kiwis and Aussies do well! I get tons of messages from people who have started portfolios since following me and are excited about their gains and their future. That’s what the project is all about, teaching more people to invest in assets and become financially powerful. That makes me proud! I hope to inspire a few millionaires!

Portfolio Breakdown

We are right on the brink of $200k.

Would have been nice to get over the hump before the year ended, but oh well.

As a comparison, check out where we were in January:

Pretty good progress, almost doubling the portfolio value in a year.

This is why investing in assets is so important – they do a lot of the wealth building for you. Of course not all of that value gain was investment returns, the majority of it was new funds, from the side hustles that I teach here on the blog.

Again – creating streams of income and using that income to buy assets is the powerful 1-2 punch that leads to wealth creation. Everything is here for you to watch and learn for free, just get started!

This portfolio is made up of:

💥 BOOM weekly savings: $5,638
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🚮 Decluttering: $8,197
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💸 Matched betting: $47,847 (get started here!)
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📦 Flipping: $2,676 (get started here!)
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📝 Surveys: $150⠀⠀
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🖥️ Simple Courses sales: $11,653

🏋️‍♀️ 1-on-1 coaching: $390
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🎉 Sharesies bonuses: $145⠀⠀
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🧧Leftovers from Chinese New Year Instagram giveaway because people didn’t want free money: $90⠀⠀

🎁Leftovers from 500 follower Instagram giveaway because people didn’t want free money: $300
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💰 Personal dividends: $3,541

🖱️ Niche Site A (Home Remedies): $11,158
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🖱️ Niche Site B (Fitness): $4,400 (SITE SOLD!)
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🖱️ Niche Site C (Superfoods): $6,838

🖱️ moneybren.com (affiliate commissions): $19,653

💵 Interest: $464
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💹 Sharemarket gainz: $36,526 (get started here!)

💹 Crypto gainz: $34,114 (get started here!)

Top 10 Holdings

Again, take a look at what the portfolio looked like in January:

The Bitcoin bottom was in March, where the price sat around $13,000, so you can see even around the bottom I was loading our Bitcoin position. That has a lot to do with the good result we had this year. Other than that – the portfolio composition hasn’t changed much. Arvida was taken over during the year, and Myer also underwent a (proposed) merger which led me to sell the stock. Everything else still remains.

The crypto portfolio is unchanged from the start of the year, though the values are different of course.

Remember back in 2023 we added 5 altcoins to the portfolio at $100 each for a total $500 investment, which was less than 1% of portfolio value at the time. I’m optimistic these will deliver outsized returns during the coming year.

Let’s kill it in 2025!

You can view all previous portfolio updates here.

Everything above can be done by you!

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