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The Suitcase Entrepreneur

Lately I’ve been listening to the podcast, “The Suitcase Entrepreneur” and I’d highly recommend it.  It features Natalie Sisson, who is doing well along the path of building passive income streams and being an online entrepreneur who travels the world, having lots of interesting adventures. Her podcasts are generally short and concise, but contain lots of interesting information and so far, I haven’t encountered any episodes that I’ve stopped 1/2 way through (a rarity for…

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Passive Income Report: April 2014

My passive income for the month of April 2014 was $274.64. You can see the breakdown of that in this Passive Income Report, as well as compared to previous months. Here is the data from previous Aprils: April 2010: 5.29 April 2011: 214.34 April 2012: 328.1 April 2013: 251.97 Overall, this month was a bit lower than other years due to decreased dividends. This year, March was a huge month for dividends, so it was…

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Invest like a Grandma: Dividend Stock Investing

There are a million and one things to invest in that are far sexier than Dividend Paying Stocks. A quick list off the top of my head: IPO’s, options contracts, shorting, commodities, emerging markets, Bit coin and day trading. A lot of these things can actually make you a lot of money IF you know what you’re doing. And while I know the basics of most of that stuff, I’m certainly no expert and would…

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Passive Income and ESL Teaching

If you want to be a digital nomad and build up passive income streams, ESL Teaching might seem kind of like an attractive gig to get into. You get paid to live overseas. And you often get a free plane ticket (Middle East /Korea) as well as paid for, or subsidized housing. And you’ll have so much time to get your online ventures up and running. Sounds fabulous! Except the thing that many people forget…

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The Emergency Fund

Dave Ramsey is all about the emergency fund and I would most definitely agree with him. He advocates having $1000 in the bank until you pay off all your debts, excluding the mortgage. And then once that is done, build it up to 3-6 months of living expenses. These past few years, I’ve been really focused on making and saving my income from the day-job to invest in Dividend Paying Stocks and must admit to…

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Stock Market Pyschology: Greed and Fear

When it comes to how psychology relates to the stock market, there are 2 emotions that dictate most individual investor’s decision: fear and greed. The so-called “Smart-Money” (hedge fund/mutual fund managers) should be making better decisions than the individual investor, but not always. Fear is rampant when the stock market is in fast decline and it leads people to do crazy things such as sell when stocks have hit their lowest points (ie: the crash…

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What’s in my Portfolio: Industrials

I have a few holdings that fall under the category of “industrials” and I love them because they just seem to plug along, making me money off dividends, increasing their earnings and causing me no stress or worry. Exactly the kind of companies I want in my portfolio. 1. Boeing Airlines(BA): 2.7% of my portfolio. Although they’ve had some problems in the past few years with their new airplane catching on fire, etc, they’re still…

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Trading vs. Investing

I’m an investor, which means that I invest my money in the stock market for the long-haul and don’t really care about the short-term fluctuations in the market. I lose no sleep if there is a crash and actually feel quite happy because I can pick up stocks that I want cheaply. Trading, on the other hand is for the purpose of making money off the fluctuations in the market. You can make money when the…

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What’s in my Portfolio: Consumer Staples

I have a few things in my portfolio that are kind of hard to classify, so I’ve just included them under the category, “Consumer Staples.” They are things that consumers buy, usually habitually and over long periods of time. 1. Kimberly Clark (KMB): 4.8% of my portfolio. Everyone uses things from this company: tissues/feminine products/baby stuff, etc, which is basically the reason that I bought it. This company is one of the most “recession-proof” companies…

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Frugal Living: lifestyle creep

I’ve lived in South Korea, working as an English teacher for almost 10 years. For the first 7 years or so, I lived extremely frugally. Like, I always rode public transport and tried to avoid taxis, didn’t have a smart-phone, stayed in the school provided housing and had no pets. And like I would really consider it seriously any time that I spent more than about $5. My weakness was travel, but I almost always…

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What’s in my Portfolio: Financial Stocks

Financial companies get a bad rap- often for good reason The whole financial sector gets a bit of a bad rap from the press, investors as well as the general public and for good reason: ridiculous compensation packages/poor financial management/extreme risk-taking/government bailouts.  However, it’s too big of a sector to overlook and the key is looking for the less-risky companies that have a proven record of good management. Here are the financial stocks in my…

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Friends on a Budget: is it Possible?

Building Passive Income: 2 Main Factors 1. Living frugally so that you have more money to invest in things like dividend paying stocks. 2. Putting the time in to develop the passive income streams through building websites, books, Iherb, Amazon, etc. Going Out in South Korea Usually Involves Drinking Living in South Korea as an expat (I’m originally from Canada), one of the things that frustrates me is that “going out” usually involves hitting up…

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OT at the day-job vs. Passive Income Building

One of the big debates that I have in my head all the time is whether to work more at my day-job, or whether to spend more time building up my passive income streams  through things like building niche websites, self-publishing books and HubPages. My job at a Korean university is kind of ideal actually because according to my contract, I only have 9 teaching hours, although I usually get forced to do 11 or…

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Passive Income Report: March 2014

For my February report, please see this post. But, onwards to March.  You can see all the details here, but the total minus interest paid to my broker was $466.44 US.  The large majority of it was in Dividends, and a big portion of that was NPK (National Presto Industries), which paid a special dividend of over $100. Compared to previous years: March 2013: 251.97 March 2012: 455.72 March 2011: 156.86 March 2010: 7.02 Similar…

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What’s in my portfolio: Tech

I’ve talked previously about my pharmaceutical holdings as well as the oil & gas companies that I hold.  You can also check out my complete portfolio, but today I’m going to talk tech. AAPL (Apple): 5% of my portfolio.  Check out the Dividend Monk’s AAPL report. INTC (Intel): 2.5% of my portfolio.  Check out the Dividend Monk’s INTC report. Tech companies are generally thought to be the high-flyers, which means that they often warrant a…

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Getting Ahead at the Day Job

I know there is much debate in the building passive income  and extreme early retirement circles about whether to focus effort on the “side-hustle,” whether that be investing, or starting online businesses or turning a hobby into a money-maker or whether to focus on the day-job and get on the promotion/pay raise ladder.  For the past 7 years or so, I’ve been focusing on the latter and using that money to invest in dividend paying…

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Borrowing to invest

Basically all online stock brokers offer what they call “Margin” which means that you can borrow money from them to buy more stocks or ETFs or whatever you want.  Of course this isn’t free!  Brokers charge interest ranging from extremely low (ie: Interactive Brokers) to extremely high (will remain nameless). The reasons to not do this include “margin calls,” which is when you borrow too much money relative to the amount of actual money that…

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Iherb Affiliate Program

Iherb: A Company That I LOVE I think that affiliate marketing can be a very valuable way to build passive income and it’s an area I’d like to explore more, with more affiliates and more niche websites.  However, I would NEVER recommend something that I don’t personally know and love because it’s just not my style. Iherb is one of those things that I just sort of fell into without even really knowing it had…

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Frugal Living and Passive Income

Frugal Living and Passive Income: Are they Related? On the surface, frugal living perhaps seems it doesn’t really relate that closely to building passive income streams, but in actuality, frugality is very necessary until you reach a certain level of passive income, at which point it doesn’t really matter how much money you spend, or don’t (to some degree….there are limits of course!). If you have $5000 a month coming in, with little to no…

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Spend Less Than you Earn

Anyone can do it! No matter your income level, spending less than you earn is by far the most important thing. We’ve all heard those stories about people earning millions of dollars a year going bankrupt. Conversely, we all know about the guy next door working at some average job who ended up dying with millions in the bank. The difference is that one guy spent more than he earned while the other one didn’t.…

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