Building a $100,000 Portfolio in 10 Years from Scratch – How Much Money Do You Need to Invest Weekly?

A six-figure stock portfolio. Doesn’t that just sound good? Well, it should sound pretty good. That’s a significant amount of wealth.

And a six-figure stock portfolio can compound and snowball into… drum roll, please… a seven-figure stock portfolio.

While some people might think getting to six figures from scratch is super difficult or that it takes a really long time, that’s actually not true at all. You can actually get to six figures within a decade.

And you can do so by investing a surprisingly small sum per week. Today, I want to tell you how much you’d have to invest per week to go from $0 to six figures within a decade. Ready? Let’s dig in.

There are three important factors at play here.

They are: consistent saving, consistent investing, and compounding.

If you can consistently save a set amount of money per week, consistently invest that money every week, and take advantage of the power of compounding, you’re setting yourself up for long-term success.

Let’s first talk consistent savings.

Living below your means and saving money isn’t a one-and-done type of thing. It’s a long-term lifestyle. It should be habitual, as part of a system of good habits.

Don’t think of saving as a bad thing. It’s not punishment. Saving money is awesome.

Money equals opportunity, flexibility, freedom, and autonomy. If you have enough money, you can make your own rules and go about life as you please. You can work on the things you enjoy, be around the people you like, and live in the places that make you happy.

What’s that worth? I think it’s worth a lot more than any material possession.

So when I think about saving money, I actually think of it as spending money. It’s just that I’m spending the money on the freedom that money itself offers, rather than spending the money on stuff. And I think that’s a healthy mental transition for you to make.

So how much consistent weekly saving and investing are we talking here?

Okay. I’m assuming you’re starting from scratch. And you want to get to a six-figure portfolio within 10 years. You’ll be consistently saving and investing every single week, and you’ll get a 10% compound annual rate of return on your investments. The amount you need to save and invest, per week, to get to a six-figure stock portfolio within a decade, is then $110.00.

$110. That’s it. That is not a massive sum to save and invest per week. Yet it does get you to six figures within a decade.

I don’t think that’s a heroic amount of money to save per week. Yet you get to a vaunted six-figure level of wealth within a decade. I mean, how amazing is that? But wait a second. $110 per week over 10 years only adds up to $57,200. How does this get to six figures?

Well, that’s the power of compounding.

Albert Einstein is said to have called compound interest the “eighth wonder of the world”. Compound interest is interest on interest. It’s old money making new money, and then that combined source of money making more new money all by itself. It’s money cloning itself over and over again at an exponential rate. This isn’t linear savings sitting under a mattress and earning 0%. This is money being invested and taking advantage of the exponential power of compounding.

The 10% compound annual rate of return I assumed for the calculation is actually in line with what the US stock market has annually returned over the long term.

This is just average stuff here. Nothing extraordinary. Yet it almost doubled the final sum. You saved a bit over $50,000 over the 10 years. But you nearly double your money via compounding, and I’m talking about a rather pedestrian rate of compounding here.

But you could very well do even better than 10%.

The US stock market isn’t a monolith. It’s less a stock market and more a market of stocks. Many, many individual stocks. And a lot of those individual stocks perform better than the market as a whole. We regularly focus on high-quality dividend growth stocks because they have a proven track record of beating the market over the long run and you get safe, growing passive dividend income on top of it.

A $100,000 portfolio of high-quality dividend growth stocks can spit out thousands of dollars per year in safe, growing dividend income while you keep your stocks.

This is income you can use to pay your bills. Or better yet, you can reinvest that growing dividend income and buy even more stocks, and accelerate this compounding process to get you to the next step – a seven-figure portfolio. Use growing dividends to buy more stocks paying growing dividends. Rinse. Repeat. Watch that snowball get bigger and roll faster. Then enjoy the flexibility and freedom this wealth provides you.

— Jason Fieber

P.S. If you’d like access to my entire six-figure dividend growth stock portfolio, as well as stock trades I make with my own money, I’ve made all of that available exclusively through Patreon.