Own Your First Share · Companion tool
Chapter 5 shows you the snowball. Chapter 14 shows you the hole in the bucket. This is where you watch both of them at once, with your own numbers.
What you actually have, not what you wish you had.
Zero is a fine answer. So is three dollars.
This is the slider that does the most work. Try moving it last.
Arithmetic, not a forecast. Nothing grows at a steady rate in real life.
The expense ratio. Move it by one tenth of one percent and watch the right-hand number.
You put in $0 of your own.
Compared with the same money at no fee at all.
Set everything else and then drag the years slider from 10 to 40. Almost all of the growth appears in the last stretch — which is why the beginning feels like nothing is happening, and why most people quit during it.
Take the fee from 0.05% to 0.55%. It looks like half of one percent. Over thirty years it is not. The fee is the only number on this page that is certain: the growth is a guess, and the cost is a fact.