When the Hard Years Finally Made Sense
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Does compound interest actually work? Let me give you my honest answer.
At the end of 2025, I sat down to update my portfolio numbers the way I do every year.
I do it the same way every time. Open the spreadsheet. Pull the current balances. Write down the number. Close the laptop.
This time I wrote the number down and then I sat there for a moment longer than usual.
The portfolio had grown by $9,927 in a single year.
Not because I had put in $9,927. My base contributions are $150 a month, $1,800 a year, plus whatever surplus budget made it in alongside the Chinese New Year money. The portfolio didn’t grow by nearly $10,000 because I saved aggressively. It grew by nearly $10,000 because of what was already there.
I had been told this would happen. I had read about it. I had believed it in a theoretical sense for years. And then I sat in front of the actual number and understood it in a different way, the way you can only understand something when it stops being a concept and becomes your own data.
What the Number Actually Meant
Does compound interest actually work when you’re starting with $30 a month? To understand what $9,927 of growth in a single year means, you have to understand what came before it.
I started investing in January 2020 with $30 a month. By the end of that year the portfolio was worth around $1,500. By the end of 2021 it was around $2,200, barely $700 more than the year before, despite a full year of consistent deposits. By the end of 2022 it had reached $3,850. Growing, but slowly. The kind of slowly that tests you.
(The full year-by-year numbers are in [How Small Amounts Add Up Over Time, Our 6 Year Investment Journey With Real Numbers]. I won’t repeat them all here. What I want to talk about is what they mean.)
In those early years, my contributions were doing almost all of the work. The portfolio grew because I put money in. The market added something, but not dramatically. The line went up, but it went up mostly because I kept showing up.
Then something shifted. By 2025, the portfolio had reached a size where the market’s return on what was already there started doing work I couldn’t match with my monthly deposit. The money that had been sitting in VTI and 0050 for five years was generating returns larger than what I was contributing.
That’s compound growth. Not the diagram. The actual thing.
The Moment That Reframed Everything
What surprised me wasn’t the number itself. What surprised me was what the number did to everything that came before it.
I thought back to 2021, the year I almost stopped.
I had been investing for a full year and the balance had barely moved. I was putting money in every month and watching the number sit almost flat. There was no obvious sign that any of this was working. I remember asking myself whether that money would have been more useful somewhere else. Whether the discipline was producing anything. Whether I was making the right call for my family on a budget that didn’t have room for mistakes.
I stayed in. But it wasn’t easy to stay in.
Looking at the 2025 number, I understood something I hadn’t fully understood before: 2021 wasn’t a year where nothing happened. It was a year where the foundation was laid. Every deposit I made in 2021, every one that felt invisible, every one I made while wondering if it mattered, was in the portfolio earning returns in 2025. The work of those flat years was invisible until it wasn’t.
There’s a phrase I kept coming back to during those hard years, one that eventually gave this blog its name: faithful with little. It’s a biblical idea, but I think it holds even without the faith context: the practice of doing the right small thing, consistently, even when the results don’t show up on schedule. In 2021 I wasn’t sure if I was being faithful or just stubborn. Looking at 2025, I think I finally understand the difference.
The hard years don’t feel like they’re building anything. That’s the nature of the early phase of compounding. But they are. Every single one.
What I Actually Learned About Compound Interest
I want to be careful here, because I think compound interest is one of the most misunderstood ideas in personal finance, not because people don’t understand the math, but because the math isn’t the hard part.
Everyone who has read about investing has seen the compound interest charts. The hockey stick. The exponential curve. The illustration where a small amount invested early grows dramatically over time. The charts are accurate. But they’re abstract in a way that makes them easy to believe and hard to act on.
What I learned in 2025 is the thing the charts don’t show: the early phase of compound interest feels like it isn’t working.
You put money in. The balance goes up. It goes up because you put money in. The market adds a little. But for years, for me, five years, contributions are doing most of the work and the compounding effect is small enough that you can’t feel it. The chart promises a hockey stick but you’re living in the flat part of the handle.
Most people quit in the flat part. They look at the balance, compare it to what they’ve contributed, decide the effort isn’t producing results worth having, and redirect the money toward something that feels more immediate.
This is the moment that separates the people who eventually see 2025 from the people who don’t.
Here’s what I didn’t understand in 2021: if you don’t have capital, time and consistency are your two best friends.
Not a high income. Not a perfect market. Not sophisticated investment knowledge. Time, specifically the number of years your money has been working. And consistency, specifically the fact that it was there in the flat years, earning returns in the background, adding to the base that made 2025 possible.
The portfolio grew by $9,927 last year because of what was deposited in 2020, in 2021, in 2022. In the years that felt like nothing was happening.
This Is Not a Story About Getting Rich
We are a missionary family that moved to Taiwan with $2,000 in a bank account. Our income through most of those six years ranged from $1,000 to $1,500 a month, variable, never guaranteed, managed across two currencies with exchange rates that shifted underneath us. I am not writing this as someone who had excess capital to invest. I am writing this as someone who started with $30 a month because $30 was what I could automate without breaking the budget.
The $9,927 in growth last year doesn’t mean we’re wealthy. It means a small, consistent investment strategy, started on an income most people would describe as unworkable for investing, produced something real after six years. Something that now grows in ways I can’t replicate by just saving harder.
That’s what I want to say to anyone reading this who is in the flat part of the handle right now. The part where the balance moves slowly and you’re not sure if the discipline is producing anything worth the effort.
It is. You just can’t see it yet.
What This Changes About How I Think
After the 2025 number, something shifted in how I talk to myself about money, not dramatically, but quietly.
I sat with the number for a while before I told Sarah. When I did, we looked at it together. Neither of us said much. But something settled. A quiet confidence in the strategy that we hadn’t quite had before. Not certainty about what the market would do next. Confidence in the direction. In the fact that this was working, not just in theory but in the actual account with the actual numbers in front of us.
Before, I thought about investing primarily in terms of what I was putting in. $150 a month. The Chinese New Year contribution. The surplus budget that made it in some months. My contribution was the main character.
Now I think about it differently. After a certain point, and you don’t know exactly when you cross it, the portfolio itself becomes a participant. Not the only one. Not replacing consistent contributions. But the money that’s already there starts doing work alongside you. You’re no longer doing it alone.
I don’t think I would have believed that in 2021 if someone had told me. I would have said yes, theoretically, I understand compound interest. And I would have meant it. But I wouldn’t have felt it the way I feel it now, looking at the year the numbers proved themselves.
The goal of this blog, the thing I’ve been trying to say from the first post, is that small, consistent decisions made over a long period of time build something real. I started it because I believed that. I keep writing it because I lived it.
2025 was the year I stopped taking it on faith.
The full investment breakdown, what I hold, why, and every year’s number from 2020 to now, is in How Small Amounts Add Up Over Time, Our 6 Year Investment Journey With Real Numbers. If you’re just starting to think about investing, [How We Started Investing on $30 a Month] is where to begin.
And if you’re in the flat part of the handle right now and wondering whether to keep going, [Is It Too Late to Start Investing?] is worth reading.
This post is part of the The $30 Investor series — the beginner investing story, told in real numbers.
Other posts in the series: How We Started Investing on $30 a Month
How Small Amounts Add Up Over Time
