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On April 28, 1989, my wife Suzie and I said “I do.” As we walked out of the church, the S&P 500 was sitting at a modest 309 points. Unfortunately, nobody thought to gift us a pre-funded index fund that day. What we actually received was three toasters, a bread maker, and enough crystal glassware to open a small shop.
But here’s a question worth asking as our anniversaries have stacked up: what if someone had slipped a $10,000 index fund certificate into one of those cards? What would that imaginary gift be worth today? And what would it have felt like to hold it through everything that followed?
By our 5th anniversary in 1994, that hypothetical $10,000, with dividends reinvested, would have grown to around $16,500. A solid 65% total return in five years. Had this been real money, we would almost certainly have concluded we were financial prodigies. We would have been wrong, but the feeling would have been delightful.
By our 10th anniversary in 1999, the imaginary portfolio had ballooned to $56,759. The internet was going to change everything, including, apparently, the rules of mathematics. In the New Economy, who needed a thought experiment when the market was doing the thinking for you?
Between 1999 and our 20th anniversary in 2009, our imaginary investor would have lived through the Dot-com crash, 9/11, and the Great Financial Crisis. Three separate occasions on which selling everything and converting to cash, or in darker moments, tinned goods, would have felt not just reasonable but obvious.
By April 2009, that notional $56,759 would have shrunk to $44,370. A decade of patience, and you’d have less than you started with. In real, inflation-adjusted terms, the purchasing power loss was considerably worse.
The Lost Decade wasn’t a brief wobble. For ten years, the imaginary investor would have had nothing to show for their commitment except a smaller number and a stern lesson in humility. The correct move was to do nothing, which is both the simplest and most psychologically brutal investment strategy ever devised.
Stay the course through all of that, and the brokerage statement on our 30th anniversary in 2019 would have shown a single number worth pausing over: $181,439.
From the 2009 low, that’s a fourfold return in a decade. The Dot-com crash and the financial crisis would have been reduced, in portfolio terms, to a detour rather than a destination. The imaginary investor who did nothing, who didn’t panic, didn’t rebalance into cash, didn’t wait for a better entry point, would be sitting on nearly $182,000 from a $10,000 starting stake.
The maddening truth of long-term index investing is that the “doing nothing” part is not the boring bit. It is the strategy.
Today, as we approach our 37th anniversary, the S&P 500 sits at around 7,165, up from 309 on our wedding day. That original imaginary $10,000 certificate, had it existed and had it been left entirely alone, would now be worth approximately $492,000.
To put that in real terms: since 1989, inflation has risen by roughly 160%, meaning you’d need around $26,000 today just to match the purchasing power of that original $10,000. Our hypothetical investor hasn’t merely kept pace with the cost of living. They’ve grown their stake nearly 19-fold in real terms.
Thirty-seven years of marriage and thirty-seven years of compounding seem to have quite a lot in common. Both reward patience over panic. Both look, in the early years, like they might not be working. And both, if you’re lucky enough to stay the course, have a way of becoming the best decision you ever made
Depends on the recipient. $10K to someone w/o money skills would likely putter it away on a luxury item, down payment on a car they can’t afford, etc. Likely few would keep it invested. Few young folks (including myself) would likely keep the money in the market.
There is also the debate as to the value in dollars today vs. future. Not in pure monetary terms. But what even a minimal amount of money can do for one when they are low means. $1K when I was a poor, unsupported college student, would have a lot more useful to me than the growth amount of this money 20 years later.
Cathy and I were also married in 1989, so this really hits home. It is a great way to explain long-term investing. The lesson is not just that the market grows over time — it is that you have to survive the scary parts without panicking. A $10,000 investment sounds simple in hindsight, but holding it through crashes, recessions, wars, inflation, and years where it felt like nothing was working would have taken real discipline. That is the part most people underestimate. Compounding rewards patience, but only if you stay in the game long enough to let it work. Marriage and investing really do have something in common: the best results usually come from commitment, endurance, and not giving up during the hard seasons.
The three toasters turned out to be appropriate, considering all the bread you made over the years!
Mazel tov on your anniversary.
Today you would keep all three in order to make it the first three years of marriage with at least one functioning toaster, as now a days you have replace them annually when they break.
As I have said to my wife we put a man on the moon nearly 60 years ago, but we can’t seem to manufacture a toaster that lasts much more than a year
David, my daughter has a toaster that cost nearly $300. It’s a vast, shiny chrome affair, bristling with more knobs and dials than any self-respecting bread-browner has any business having. The first time I tried to use the thing, I couldn’t even work out how to get the bread near the elements.
Index compounding pales in comparison to the 37 year commitment Suzie and you nurtured. Happy Anniversary.
Thanks Mark!
BY THE WAY….HAPPY 37th Anniversary, Mark. I wish you both continued hope, health, and happiness.
Also, forgive typo on my earlier post. $10,000, not $10,00.
Thanks Mike!
Mark:
In the words of the Christian Rock Group, Mercy Me, “I Can Only Imagine” what those numbers would be based on our numbers. On June 23, 2026, my bride and I will celebrate our 52nd wedding anniversary.
According to Claude.ai, had we invested $10,00 on June 23, 1974, it would have grown to $2.4M by June 23, 2024, our 50th wedding anniversary.
Here was Claude.ai’s comment:
What a golden anniversary result! That $10,000 wedding gift would have grown to approximately $2,473,000 — almost two and a half million dollars — over exactly 50 years.
A few highlights from the journey:
The rocky start. You invested right into a bear market — 1974 was one of the worst years in S&P 500 history, down nearly 26%. Your $10,000 fell to about $8,548 by year-end. But you would have recovered fully within two years, and the 1975 and 1976 rallies more than made up for it.
The great bull run. The 1990s were extraordinary. From 1991 through 1999, the market posted positive returns every single year, and your investment went from about $82K to $443K in just nine years.
The two big gut-checks. The dot-com bust (2000–2002) sliced the portfolio from $443K down to $277K — a 37% drop. Then 2008 alone took it from $504K to $320K (-37%). Both times, staying invested was the only way to capture the recoveries that followed.
The home stretch. The decade from 2013 to 2024 was exceptional, with the portfolio going from $723K to nearly $2.5M.
The key stats: +24,634% total return at 11.65% annualized — slightly above the S&P 500’s long-run historical average, reflecting the particularly strong era your 50-year window captured. Happy 50th anniversary! 🎉
As always, this assumes dividends fully reinvested, no taxes along the way (as in an IRA or similar), and minimal fund expenses. Real-world results would be somewhat lower.
If there was ever a case for following Jack Boigle’s advice to “Just stand there, don’t do anything,” this is it.
Thanks for an interesting post.
Mike, I wonder what the result would have been if that $10,000 had been held in cash for a few years—waiting for a “better time” to invest—rather than buying into the 1974 bear market at a discount?
I’m guessing that $2.5 million 50th-anniversary total would have been meaningfully reduced.
We’ve been tracking our investments yearly since 1992.
We have changed from an early all equities portfolio to a mixed one with CDs and Money Markets gradually as we’ve aged. We rebalance about once a year.
We describe it as “couch potato” investing.
Our average annual return has just been a bit over 7%.
We feel comfortable with that and also watching that return drift slowly lower through the years.
I do wish I had discovered index funds much earlier, but here’s a real world example of a personal investment of $20,000 into Fidelity Contrafund in 1993. Even with taking some dividends and capital gains over the years, it now sits at over $600,000!
That’s an impressive result! I’m not familiar with the fund, but since you’ve outperformed the S&P 500, I assume it’s tilted toward growth stocks?
Fidelity Contrafund (FCNTX) is a $157.8B large-growth mutual fund heavily weighted toward technology (25.8%) and communication services (22.2%). As of April 2026, the top holdings on Stock Analysis and Yahoo Finance include Meta Platforms (11.29%), NVIDIA (8.93%), Amazon (5.42%), Berkshire Hathaway (5.28%), and Alphabet (3.92%), focusing on companies with unrecognized value.
My parents actually did give us stocks as a wedding gift. Unfortunately, my father always picked stocks the way he picked horses to bet on – never a winner. The company he picked was a telecom whose stock drifted lower and lower until it was bought out by another company, leaving investors with pennies on the dollar. Oh well, it’s the thought that counts!
David, a good illustration of why I don’t pick individual stocks!
Same here! Index funds only.
Thanks for the compounding lesson. Examples like yours are compelling, because most folks don’t seed an account with an initial investment and then just walk away. We add to the account, a little here, a bit there, etc. Making it difficult to recognize the compounding benefit. In fact, I spent more time evaluating the impact of the employer match to my contribution.
Compounding is hard to visualise in the early years — the effects are subtle and easy to dismiss. But as a portfolio grows, it becomes impossible to ignore, and eventually your own contributions start to look almost trivial by comparison. Compounding and dividend reinvestment really are the two superstars of the investment world!
How about a non-US index you’d have been more likely to invest in?
That’s a fair point — our imaginary ending amount would definitely be smaller in reality, but still substantial.
The S&P 500 has averaged around 10.5–11% annually over this timeframe, and in the UK I’d most likely have been in an MSCI World Global Tracker, which has historically returned closer to 10%. So yes, I’d have ended up with considerably less on paper — but probably not in practice. Once you factor in that a US investor carries significant healthcare costs that a UK investor simply doesn’t, a chunk of that larger pot was never really theirs to spend freely. On a genuine like-for-like basis, the two investors are probably closer to parity than the raw numbers suggest.
That’s a nice angle on the never-tiresome story of compound interest!
Thanks Edmund. I’d been playing around with the idea of an article — following your very first deposit into an investment account through the years — and then the wedding anniversary just popped into my head as the perfect vehicle to carry it.
Happy anniversary to you Krazy Kidz!
The only things I can say about my own wedding in 1983 and our finances are (a) it was a very cheap wedding and (b) we were too young and dumb to realize that we were actually too poor to get married. And yet here we still are!
Blessings!
We were very much in the same boat: married too young, too poor, and probably too clueless to know any better. And yet somehow we made it work. Sometimes ignorance is bliss!
For our wedding in 1982 my three piece suit cost $200, my wife’s dress cost $50 off the rack then $50 to alter, we were married by my father in law who was a minister (how’s that for getting the father’s approval?). The flowers were donated by my father in law’s previous employee who bought his shop and were arranged by my wife (who had worked in her father’s shop growing up) and her sisters. The venue for reception was a fixed up barn next to a country inn (decades before it became fashionable). The reception was a mid afternoon, and the attendees brought food. The cake was made by family. The entertainment was by my sister in law’s folk group with a small donation.
The total was definitely significantly less than 1K which we paid for ourselves.
That was a lot of money for us because I was going to graduate school. We had $5K to or names that I saved working for $14K a year for two years after my bachelors degree (all while making my school loan payments). At graduate school the only income we knew we had guaranteed was $6K for my working at a nearby high school as an athletic trainer (my wife later secured a job working minimum wage at a flower shop).
That was nearly 44 years ago, and yet here we are. Sometimes I think that amount spent on a wedding is inversely related to the length of the marriage.
Oh yeah and for our honeymoon we drove from NH to Cape Cod and stayed at my grandfather’s (true) cottage for three days because we had to get a move on and drive half way across the country for me to start school.
David, with one of my daughters getting married next February, I’ve been getting quite the education in the eye-watering costs that seem to accompany modern weddings. I nearly choked on my coffee when Suzie told me what the flowers were going to cost — I’d had something like seven or eight hundred dollars in my head. It’s over $4,000. I offered to nip to the local supermarket the day before and pick the whole lot up for $300, but apparently that makes me childish 😂
Happy anniversary AND compounding!
Thanks Dave!
For context, based on a CPI calculator, that $10,000 in April of 1989 would be equivalent to about $27,000 today.
That would be quite a gift. But an even better return!
But the best gift of all is your marriage! Happy Anniversary to you and your bride.
Doug, thanks very much 😀 compounding is a powerful beast, especially as it starts snowballing in the later years.