We talk a lot about what price target to sell at here, but others talk about goals. I'm more of the latter now.
I ordered my first Tesla, P85 in December 2013, hardly any Superchargers in Europe and no real indication that Tesla would be around long enough to build it out, but the car was so amazing I couldn't resist - and thanks to the tax laws, it was as cheap as my previous Volvo on net cost.
Like most others that buy a Tesla, I started following the company and then wanted a part of it - bought 8 shares on 10th July 2015 at $270 each; of course, with some skin in the game, you start digging deeper.
In January 2016, we sold our house and started renting. I know this sounds a bit odd, but in Brussels, you pay around 12% taxes on a house purchase and my wife gets restless - we were moving every two years or so. While the prices rose, you could cover the taxes, but this occasion the market had been stagnant, so we essentially lost €75k and I decided it would be better to rent, allowing easy moving around, plus the rent was 20% lower than mortgage for nicer properties, so I persuaded wifey this was the way to go.
When we closed-out our mortgage, we got around €60k cash back at the beginning of February. This was the time of the big drop on Chinese growth worries, the SP halved to the $140's. I proposed to my wife we put it into $TSLA as it had dropped so low, after some persuasion she allowed me to buy 100 shares at $149 on 16th Feb. A week later and it was about $160, she saw some potential there and permitted me to use the rest of the money - 307 more shares & $165.93 - some regret there with the delay!
You have to know that we both have good jobs - wife is an official at the European Commission and I'm a freelance consultant at the same establishment - albeit a completely different area. Between us we earn very decent money, but three kids and bad spending habits meant we had zero savings and were living from payday to payday.
We had a dream of buying a summer-house in Denmark, in my wife's home town, so we said, let's see f we can get enough from our shares to do that. We also agreed between us that Tesla could go bust and we'd lose it all. For €60k that was OK. This type of money is nice to have, but it's not life-changing. I started adding shares when I had the money, mostly in the $200 range. The stock doubled with the M3 reveal, but then crashed back down to half and then at that moment, a summer-house came up for sale and we negotiated a good price, but it was twice our current shares value, we'd have had to get loans and mortgages, all sort of complex stuff (as it was in another country) and we got as far as almost signing for it when I got cold feet, realised I was giving the shares away and loaning us up-to-the eyeballs for 10 years. We discussed and backed-out of it, and agreed to wait until we had pure cash to buy something.
So fast-forward to today and we could buy that same house 4 times over. And that's where the goals come in, because the goals have changed. The new goal is to be able to buy a suitable, but very nice house in Brussels again, for cash. Although Brussels is expensive by Belgian standards, it's cheap compared to London, Paris, Copenhagen, etc. You can get a good, detached house in a top neighbourhood for around €1.5 million. So this is now one of those goals. But added to that, we'd still like the summerhouse, and could get something fantastic for €500k, really fantastic, or on the Dutch coast, or north France, lots of options. This leads is to a $2million cash-out target.
However, it's a bit more complex than that because aside our personal shares (which can be sold tax-free, BTW), I have my trading account in my company, which stands at $350k for the moment. I realised that if I could get this up to $1m and we no longer had to pay rent, I could stop the day job and just trade the capital for income, so that's also now a goal too.
So when would this be achieved? $3000k per share, I think, maybe a bit sooner. But it's not about the same price, it's about those goals I mentioned above. A home without mortgage or rent, a place in the country, and a retirement (of sorts) for me.
None of this would be possible, even thinkable without Tesla - their remarkable employees, their maverick CEO and the help of the short-sellers and BS merchants keeping the stock low for so long.
- house
- summer house
- early retirement
Sorry for the long post, just felt a need to share.
Edit: I realise I meant to type $4000 PT, not $3000 - so 3x from here-ish.
