Revealing My ENTIRE $20 Million Dollar Portfolio | 31 Years Old

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What's up, Duncan? It's Donuts here. So, almost a year ago, I made a video breaking down in extreme detail every single one of my investments: how I started, how I built them up, how much money they make, and the lessons I've learned along the way, going from zero all the way up to $13 million. I really did my best to be as transparent and practical as possible when discussing my experiences because I've always been the type who learns best by example. I want—I’m able to see how other people do it; it gives me a more clear path to follow.

Not to mention, throughout the last 2 years, quite a lot has changed. My accounts grew from $6 million in November of 2019 to $13 million in November of 2020, to now $22 million in November of 2021. Yeah, it's a lot of 20s! Being able to track all of that publicly, in real time, for everyone to see should help provide some more context into exactly how that happened and where I plan to invest in the future.

So, without further ado, here are the entire contents of my $22 million investment portfolio at 31 years old. As always, my intention is to make these videos as insightful and educational as possible because I know, at least for myself, I really enjoy seeing how other people manage their money, and I'm just kind of nosy and I want to know where it all goes.

So, with that said, if you enjoy videos like this, it would help me out tremendously if you gave the like button a quick tap for the YouTube algorithm. That's it! It seriously makes a tremendous difference for my entire channel, and it takes you just a split second like you would be done with it already had you already done that. There we go! So thank you guys so much, and now here's my entire portfolio and how I was able to almost double it in a year.

All right, so to give you some context about where it all started, I made my first major investment when I was 21 years old, and I bought a single-family rental property in San Bernardino, California, for $59,500. In terms of where I was able to get $60,000 at 21 years old, it was really easy. My dad said he'd give me an early birthday present because I got such good grades at school—just kidding! I got horrible grades at school; I was a C student at best. My parents didn't have any extra money to give me. Instead, what actually happened is that when I was 18 years old, I found out that I was not getting into college because, honestly, I was a terrible student. I skipped school as often as I could, and I would go to work instead.

I know it sounds odd, but I got a part-time job at a marine aquarium wholesaler who paid me under the table. When I was doing that, I just couldn't sit through a class because I felt like I should be putting that time to a more productive use, which to me at the time was just going and working and making money. But the result was that once the company sold off and shut down, and I was graduating high school, I didn't have the grades or the credentials to get into college. So, I decided to go and get my real estate license to get some work experience instead.

Now, at the time, it was 2008, and the real estate market had literally just peaked. The bubble was over, and I started my career right at the height of everything, just as prices were starting to crumble down. But for me, I didn't mind—I had no reference to what a good real estate market even looked like. So, foreclosures, short sales, and bank-owned properties on every single block just kind of seemed normal.

But there was a bit of a problem: in 2008, very few people were buying properties since the market was dropping so fast, and on top of that, not many properties were selling since there was so much coming on the market for buyers to choose from. However, I quickly found that there was an abundance of people looking to rent a home, and that's where I found my strength as a real estate agent. I would work 6 to 7 days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day, finding people homes and apartments to rent. Slowly but surely, that business built up. Those renters referred me to other renters who referred me to other renters, and really, within the first 6 months or so, I started building up an income of about a few thousand a month.

Then, after almost one year of doing that, I happened to sell my first house through a client that I met holding an open house for another agent. That very first deal that I closed was for $3.6 million, and that meant that my commission, after all the splits and fees, came to about $45,000. Not only was that a life-changing amount of money for me, but it also made me realize that if I could do it once, I had what it takes to do it again. If I just followed that same path, I could make even more money.

Then from there, only 2 months after I sold the first house, I sold another house for $1.2 million to some tenants that I was showing around who decided to buy something instead. After that, the business just kept getting better and better. The more tenants I worked with, the more people they would refer me to, and the higher the chances were that one of them would eventually buy a house. I continued on that trajectory, working with pretty much anyone who was willing to work with me, saving as much money as I could.

Within about 3 and a half to 4 years, I had roughly $200,000 saved up. Now, at the time, I really wasn't saving that money for anything in particular. I just knew that my career as a real estate agent was so inconsistent that I didn't know when I would close my next deal or how long it would take or how much it would be, so I just felt safer saving as much as I could.

But in late 2011, the real estate market was absolutely awful. Properties were selling for less than half the price that they were a few years prior. It was around that time that I started to notice some really wealthy, smart investors buying up real estate. So, I figured if all of these other people were doing this, then it's probably something I should be doing too. After months of searching, learning, and writing offers, I bought this property for $559,500, and since it was a bank-owned property, I had to pay for it in cash.

I then spent another $112,000 doing some minor upgrades, and today that home rents for $1,800 a month. The value of that area has also gone up substantially, and now it's worth somewhere about $380,000. I still own it; I still rent it; and I have no intention of ever selling this one, especially because it was the first deal that got me into real estate to begin with.

Now, my second rental property was another single-family home that I bought shortly after the first one for $72,000 in the same neighborhood. See, when I first started looking at real estate to buy, I only focused on a few neighborhoods that I felt were undervalued and had sufficient cash flow potential. But there was a bit of a problem with that because every single property that I was looking at was what was called a short sale. This is what happened when the owner of a property had a mortgage higher than what the home was actually worth. Like, for example, back then someone might have had a $300,000 mortgage on a property that was now only worth $110,000.

In most of those cases, the owner could either no longer afford to make the payments or they don't want to make the payments, so they go to the bank and ask for what's called short sale approval, meaning the bank will agree to sell it to somebody else for a much lower price so that way the bank could get some of their money back on the deal instead of spending years foreclosing on the owner only to take the property back and have to sell it for a fraction of what it's worth anyway.

However, in 2011, since banks were inundated with short sales, the process could often take upwards of a year. The way it would work is that a seller would list the property on the market, accept an offer, send that offer to the bank, and then you patiently wait for the bank to accept or reject it. Usually, about 4 to 8 months would go by before you hear anything from the bank, and usually when they do get back they'll ask for a slightly higher price from the buyer, at which point it's up to the buyer if they want to proceed or back out. But then if the buyer backs out, the seller is able to sell it to anyone else at the price the bank agreed on.

So, I pretty much took this process as an open invite to write as many offers as possible, knowing that if the offer didn't get accepted, it's no big deal. And if it did get accepted, then I'd have to wait months to hear back anyway, at which point I could back out if I no longer wanted the deal. Now, this second property was one of those offers, and when it came back with short sale approval, I jumped on it. Like I mentioned, I bought it for $72,000, paid for with cash, and then I spent another $8,000 fixing it up, and rented it out for $1,150 a month.

In fact, to this day, I still actually have the same tenant who moved in in 2012. I've never raised the rent; they've always treated the place like their own, and they've always paid on time. And now, since the market has gone up a lot in that area, the home is also worth about $380,000.

Next, my third property is a 3-unit triplex that I bought around the same time as the first two for $125,000. Except this one was a bit of a handful! This one was originally listed as a short sale for $105,000 in March of 2012. So, when I saw this come on the market, I immediately jumped on it. I offered the full price, $115,000 cash. The seller signed it, and then I patiently waited for the bank to see if they would accept.

Now, months went by, and I ended up closing on the first two homes that I mentioned before. The bank got back with approval on this one; except the bank didn't approve the $15,000 I offered them; instead, they wanted $125,000! This was over my budget. It was more than I felt the property was worth, and it needed to be remodeled. On top of it, I was also really strapped for cash at the time, and I couldn't afford $125,000 since I spent a lot of my money buying the first two properties.

So, in preparation of maybe being able to buy this deal, I chose to sell my car just so that I would be able to come up with enough cash to be able to close on it if they needed the money right away. So, I went back in and I offered them $110,000, and they very quickly said, “$15,000, take it or leave it!” So, I sucked it up, I paid the $125,000, and then I also spent another $115,000 fixing it up and doing some light remodeling.

Now, looking back, I'm so glad I bought that property because it's been consistently rented since then, and its current market value is somewhere around $460,000 with a rental value of about $2,800 a month.

After that, my fourth property was bought a few years later in 2016 in West Los Angeles for $780,000. Now, prior to this, my career as a real estate agent started doing really, really well. A lot of my past tenants started buying properties, they referred me more business, and as a result, I was making significantly higher commissions to the tune of about $200,000 a year.

However, by 2016, I noticed the demand for Los Angeles real estate was shifting further inland as tech companies were moving into what's called Silicon Beach, outpricing those areas and causing people to move further out. So, I saw that as an opportunity to buy a home in the path of this appreciation by strategically buying just one step outside the current interest.

In my mind, I figured that if things continued on the same trajectory, my area would be the next one to go up in value. So, I ended up buying a home for $780,000, representing myself as the agent, and then spending another $60,000 fixing it up. I later rented it out for just over $4,000 a month, and then I sat back and waited for the market to do its thing. Sure enough, a few years later it did!

Google wound up moving their headquarters a mile away, Amazon started a new production studio close by, and the entire area saw a resurgence of value. Now the home is worth about $1,450,000.

Next, my fifth property is something I featured a lot here in the channel, and that would be the duplex that I bought in 2017 for $585,000. Now, at that time, I was looking for an income property in the mid-city of Los Angeles that I could buy for an investment.

I really liked this area in particular because it was close to nearby transit, it was surrounded by several large new developments, and it was just a 15-minute drive away from the beach. Plus, most importantly, it was one of the few areas left in Los Angeles that were under a million dollars.

I know that sounds absolutely crazy, but that's the market! Unfortunately, though, areas like this are highly competitive, and I spent 6 months writing offers, getting outbid, losing deals, and otherwise really getting nowhere—until, of course, this place came up. It was priced significantly under market value; the owner was an out-of-area investor who had no idea what it was worth, and the agent didn't specialize in the area either. So, they just kind of threw it up at a price that they thought it was worth.

So, I swooped in and got my offer accepted before anyone else was able to see it. At the time, I estimated it was probably worth about $675,000, and I was able to buy it at almost $100,000 under market value.

Now, it definitely needed a decent amount of work, so I spent another $60,000 fixing up the unit, redoing the roof, redoing all the landscape, and then by the time I was done, I realized, “Wait a second! I could live here, and the rent from the other unit would subsidize my cost!” Not to mention, I'm building equity, and I'd be able to use the garage as a tax write-off if I added that as my office.

So, it became a very easy decision to move in. I was also able to renovate the unit next to me for another $130,000 when the tenant moved out, and by doing so, I was able to get a much higher rent than I could before. So, all in all, this is a property that I was able to buy for $585,000. I spent $210,000 fixing it up over 2 years, and now it's worth about $1,350,000 and rents for about $6,000 a month.

Now, my sixth property was purchased not too much longer after that, in 2018 in mid-city Los Angeles, and you guessed it, it's another duplex that I paid $835,000 for. This is one of those deals that I had no intention of buying! I was not in the market for another property, but I saw it come up, I loved it, I went to see it in person, and immediately I saw that there was so much opportunity.

Now, what really caught my attention was that it was listed as a one-bedroom one-bath when in actuality, it was a one-bedroom plus a room that you could easily convert into another bedroom with the guest bathroom that was adjacent to it. So, I could easily get a few hundred extra dollars a month by just calling it a two-bedroom instead because, in a way, it was.

So, I went ahead and wrote an offer at a price that I felt comfortable paying, which was their asking price of $835,000. However, I also estimated that for the right person, they would be willing to pay up to $900,000 because the home was really charming. There was nothing else like it in the area, and it was the only legally zoned duplex on a street full of single-family properties.

Now, unfortunately for me, they ended up getting multiple bids on the property. They ended up accepting an offer that was $900,000, and I thought I missed out. But a few weeks went by, and that buyer ended up canceling because they couldn't get a loan. The seller went to the second-highest offer, which was $875,000, but that person also canceled because they found something else.

So, a month after coming on the market, they came back to me to see if I was still interested, and I was! I offered my same price of $835,000, and after a week or so of going back and forth, eventually, they accepted it. So, as of today, I'm currently getting about $5,200 a month in rent, and it's worth about $1,175,000.

After that, in early 2020, I bought my seventh property, which was—surprise!—another duplex in West Los Angeles, and I paid $2.1 million for it, which was significantly more money than I wanted to spend. See, I spent the majority of 2019 trying to find another deal to buy because, frankly, I was ready for some more space. But it just seemed like there were no more good deals in Los Angeles. Everything was getting bid up; prices got to the point where there was no more upside, and even though I would make a few offers here and there, ultimately, everything ended up selling for a price that I was not willing to pay.

But then after almost a year of searching, this place came up. We decided to see it just for fun, even though it was out of my price range from what I wanted to spend. Immediately, I knew: “This is it!” It was in the perfect location; it was walking distance to the beach, the backyard was incredible, and it had a completely detached second house on the property.

I knew financially I could make it work, but it was way more expensive than I had ever wanted to pay. So, against my rational thinking, I followed my heart and I went for it. Since I was one of the first people to the open house and the very first one to write an offer, I was able to get the price down to $2,096,000.

Now, honestly, as much as I could justify this as a good investment, at the core, it was a really sentimental purchase because this home was located on the same street that I grew up on as a kid. Now, keep in mind, when I grew up there, this neighborhood was not the expensive housing market that you see today. Throughout the late 1990s, my parents were paying $1,500 a month in rent for a two-bedroom, 1,100-square-foot house that would have probably sold for anywhere between $300,000 and $400,000. And keep in mind, at that time, this was a lot of money!

Today, however, since the current housing market is insane, this property's value has increased from $2.1 million to $2.5 million today, or in other words, it's worth $400,000 more than I had paid for it 2 years ago without doing any work on it whatsoever. Now, most of that is due to the housing shortage, but even then, I have no intention of selling it. Long term, I just believe there's always going to be a premium for coastal real estate, which makes this a good hold.

And lastly, I made one final real estate purchase in late 2020, and that was this home in Las Vegas for $1.438 million. I also spent another $112,000 building out the pool in the backyard, so all in, I'm $1,550,000. This is our new primary residence after we made the decision to leave California, which is almost exactly a year ago to the day.

Even though I spent my entire life in Los Angeles, and that was all I knew, the quarantine really showed us that we don't have to live in Los Angeles to lead a happy, fulfilling life and business. It really opened the door to new locations that I never thought were possible to move to. But since my entire business really began shifting online, it started to make a lot of sense to move somewhere else and try something new.

Not only do I have a lot of people close by that I could collaborate with, but there's also no traffic, everything is substantially cheaper, there's no air quality issues, and I'm able to grow the channel in so many new ways that I never thought were possible. For example, I now have space for an in-house editor, I built out a new filming studio that's twice as large as it was before, I have my own dedicated podcast set that's 15 ft away, and everything I need is pretty much just within the confines of the house.

Not to mention, I'm also not oblivious to the tax savings of moving from California, which has a 13.3% tax rate, to Nevada, which has a 0% state income tax rate. Just the tax savings alone on paper should pay for this entire property within about 3 years. Not to mention, I've been able to do so many new collaborations with other people who travel to the area, so it was just a no-brainer decision to make that happen.

Not to mention, Las Vegas property values have been going through the roof over this last year, and since I purchased the property, it's now worth about $2.1 million—or $550,000 higher than what I had locked in pricing about 15 months ago. Now, in terms of where I think the future lies for Las Vegas real estate values, even though there's no shortage of land to build for the foreseeable future, developers just can't keep up with demand, and a scarcity of materials combined with an influx of out-of-state buyers should keep prices fairly buoyant for the next few years.

And now, here's where we get to the new stuff. Throughout the last 2 years, I've been placing a much larger importance on diversifying my portfolio away from real estate since, to me, strategically, it's just not a good idea to have 100% of your portfolio in one asset class. And so, because of that, I began investing in the stock market. Now, some of that was very lucky timing since I was sitting on a lot of cash right before COVID hit, but that allowed me to invest a substantial amount during the February to June 2020 lows of the market.

I just bought a consistent mix of S&P 500 index funds and a few individual stocks that I thought were unjustly beat down, and currently my largest stock market account is worth about $6.4 million, of which is split almost 50/50 between individual stocks and index funds. I also have a few other investment accounts that I use on a regular basis, including M1 Finance, Acorns, Ally Invest, Weeble, Vanguard, and Public, which will give you a free stock NOW worth all the way up to $1,000—we use Link Down Below in the description.

So, overall, I have about $7 million invested in the stock market, and I continue to buy in on a regular basis throughout the S&P 500, the total stock market index, and international index funds. I'm just a boring buy-and-hold investor in this category, and every now and then I'll dabble with individual stocks, but it's not that often.

On top of that, I've started diversifying my portfolio outside of just stocks and real estate. Throughout the last 18 months, I've also begun investing a portion of my money throughout the fintech space through angel investments. This is when I invest in supply funding for a growing non-public company, and I've taken a huge interest in this kind of venture because it involves the companies and the apps that I use on a day-to-day basis.

Unfortunately, I can't disclose exactly how much I have invested in each company, but I will say it includes the likes of Yat, Bank Public, Creative Juice, two credit card companies I can't talk about quite yet, and a small variety of others. As of right now, the total value of all of these investments is probably worth somewhere between $2 and $5 million. But it's really difficult to say because these are not publicly traded companies, and their value is somewhat dependent on their last round of funding.

Not to mention, these are very illiquid investments that I cannot cash out of. I don't have access to any of that money; I can't borrow against it, and in the future, they're either going to be worth a lot of money or I'm going to break even. So, as far as I'm concerned, I basically just pretend like this money doesn't even exist, and until it's cash in my bank account, I don't count it as a sure thing.

I also have a few other investments that are worth mentioning, like one is my coffee company, Bankroll Coffee, which currently does about $20,000 to $30,000 a month in gross sales. Obviously, only a small fraction of that is actually profit, and of that profit, it's all reinvested back into the business to keep it growing. But I have a long-term vision to continue growing this out and provide people with a great tasting, affordable coffee delivered right to your door with free shipping on orders over $35. So make sure to stay tuned on how this plays out at BankrollCoffee.com.

I also have a stock market app called the Hungry Bull, which provides a daily newsletter and a one-stop-shop that aggregates all stock market information in one place, including SEC reports, earnings calls, and anything else you need to know to do as much research as possible for long-term investing. I'll link to it down below in the description, but as of right now, we have about 60,000 users, and that continues to grow at a rate of about 500 new people a day.

All of this, however, is really just an investment in the future, and it allows me to be a part of a company from the very beginning and help grow it. And we're almost done, but my investment portfolio would not be complete without a few final options, and that would include cryptocurrency. In early January of 2021, I made a video on my decision to invest 1% of my entire portfolio in a 60/40 split between Bitcoin and Ethereum, and I'm not going to bore you with the details, but the justification was simply this: throughout the last decade, a small allocation to Bitcoin has been shown to be a successful hedge against your portfolio, and it's a way to diversify into a new asset class that isn't correlated with anything.

For me, I just decided that I would rather have the 1% chance and be in it than take the 1% risk and miss out. Although something happened after I made that initial investment—the more I began researching cryptocurrency, the more potential I began to see and the more money I started investing. What started as 1% quickly became 3%, which soon became 5%, and now my goal is to have 8% of my portfolio between Bitcoin and Ethereum by the end of the year. Currently, I have about a million dollars invested here, and there's really not a lot of strategy into doing this. I just buy Bitcoin and Ethereum on a regular basis, and that's pretty much it.

I also have some other alternative investments that I think will continue going up in value, like the 2005 Ford GT, and since I bought that about 10 months ago, its value is already up about 25% based on some recent sales. So, in a way, the Ford GT was about as good of an investment as the S&P 500—that's crazy! And eventually, I believe these are all going to be half a million dollar cars, but hey, we'll see what happens.

And lastly, I know this one sounds quite excessive, but I keep about $3.2 million in cash between high-interest savings accounts, CDs, and treasuries. Now, I get that that's a lot of cash to hold on the sidelines, but keep in mind, a big chunk of that is going to pay a tax bill coming up very soon, and I'm looking to buy another multifamily property if a good deal comes up, so I need some cash to pounce on that. Plus, there's a bit of a safety net in here that if something were to happen—knock on wood, it doesn't—I have something to fall back on.

So, between all of those accounts and investments that I just mentioned, it comes to a total of $22.37 million, not including the value of private equity, because for all I know that could be worth absolutely nothing in the future, so it's not worth counting until it’s cash in the bank account. I also have about $4 million worth of mortgage debt, and as I mentioned, I have no intention of paying it off early because the interest rates are so low, and inflation is so high.

Now, throughout this next year of 2022, I really just plan to do more of the same. For me, it's really just a no-hassle approach to investing, and I really enjoy being able to buy in the same thing consistently without overthinking it. I also think that with something like this, it's really important to give back.

So, right now, I'm going to be donating $10,000 to team.org, which cleans up one pound of trash for every dollar donated. If you want to help me in cleaning up the oceans, it's going to be the first link in the description, and if you found this video helpful in any way, the best way to thank me is just to make a donation to Team Seas in any amount that you feel comfortable with, even if it's just a dollar.

Or, if you just want to enjoy this information with no strings attached whatsoever, that's totally fine. But feel free to subscribe if you want to, especially since that's free! Anyway, that is my entire investment portfolio, and I really hope that provides some context into exactly what I look for, how I invest, and where I plan to invest in the future because, like I said, I find these videos incredibly valuable, and it's my intention to continue being as open as possible when it comes to all of this information and to show you that you don't need to start off with a whole bunch of money in order to grow to something much larger in the future.

So, with that said, you guys, thank you so much for watching! I really appreciated it. As always, make sure to subscribe, hit the like button, hit the notification bell, feel free to add me on Instagram and on my second channel, The Graham Stephan Show. Thank you guys so much for watching, and till next time!