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November 2014 Passive Income came in at $288.14. For the breakdown and comparison to the previous few months, check out: Passive Income Report The bulk of my income came from dividend paying stocks and Hubpages (formerly Squidoo), as usual but a nice addition was $42.68 in sales from my my new Ebook, How to Get a University Job in South Korea: The English Teaching Job of Your Dreams. Compared to previous years: Nov. 2013: 268.98…
US stocks are flying high lately, with the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average hitting record highs. I just checked my portfolio and was shocked to discover that I’d just made $7000 US in the past 30 days. Now, I’m under no illusion that these are “actual” gains because what goes up, must come down. Here’s what I do to prepare for the inevitable. I like to have at least 5 or 6…
I was talking to one of my friends just getting into investing last night and we talked a bit about investing in individual stocks vs. ETF’s. I like individual stocks because I think, perhaps foolishly that I can choose the “winners,” that is those that are increasing dividends and earnings consistently over time and are the leaders in industries which are growing. But, if you are someone who is not interested in putting the time…
October 2014 wasn’t a great month for me in terms of passive income with a total of $253.44. Check out my October 2014 passive income report. Iherb and Amazon were pretty disappointing partly due to Iherb not offering any free shipping to South Korea and traditionally dividends are not plentiful in November. Compared to previous Years: 2013: $268 2012: $296 2011: $352 2010: $28 Onwards and upwards! My Ebook should be coming out in the…
Squidoo shut down their doors a couple of months ago and moved all my content over to Hubpages. After some initial annoyance getting all the details sorted out, it’s actually been pretty painless and it provided me the motivation I needed to get my sites updated because Hubpages seems to have stricter content standards than Squidoo (they’re serious about spammy stuff!). One thing that I didn’t notice until a couple of days ago was the…
I totally get that having a good cover on a book is EXTREMELY important, whether it is a print book, or an Ebook. Me, along with just about everyone else in the world has been known to buy a book, or not based solely on the cover. Except I also know that I’m one of the most un-creative people in the world when it comes to things like art, home decorating, graphic design, outside-the-box thinking,…
If you’ve been following this blog, you know that I’ve been wavering in indecision about what to do with my excess cash. Sitting on it earning 1% interest is a terrible option because I’m actually losing money due to inflation and I can earn more than that on basically all of the stocks that I own because of the dividend, no matter what the actual stock price is. And you’d also know that I eventually…
I talked last month about how I had an excess of cash just sitting in my brokerage account, earning no interest and how I was kind of paralyzed by indecision. I decided that no decision was not really a good decision in this case, and so I put in some limit orders for stocks that I only had a 1/2 position in for some reason or another. Generally, I consider about $5000 US worth of…
A couple of months ago, I got an email from Squidoo saying that they had merged with Hubpages and that Squidoo would be closing down and all the content would be going over to Hubpages. I was initially quite annoyed, but of course that’s the risk when you use a platform that isn’t your own to build websites. I’ve been so busy at the day-job since that announcement that I didn’t really have much time…
While I was out hiking today, I was listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast by Pat Flynn, episode #124, where he interviews Steve Scott, who is making a lot of money by writing Ebooks. It kind of inspired me and got me thinking about what is a topic that people want to know a lot about, but that there just isn’t much information, but which I’m an expert. I have an idea that I…
When you invest in dividend paying stocks, you invest like an old lady. It’s considered one of the most conservative ways that you could invest in individual stocks and in order to be effective, it has to be done over the very long-term. 10 years would be the absolute minimum I’d recommend and “forever” is even better. The hope is that I’ll eventually just be able to live well off the dividends I receive and…
This was an excellent month for me, due to a lot of dividend payouts ($484.91). September is usually one of the best months of the entire year for this. I also had an above average number of sales on Amazon($52.46). The total was $628.16. Check out my September 2014 passive income report. Compared to previous years: Sept. 2013: 529.41 Sept. 2012: 496.21 Sept. 2011: 205.21 Sept. 2010: 504.45
For the past few months, I’ve been “in the red” in my investing account because I’ve been buying some stocks on margin, which basically means that I’ve been borrowing money from the brokerage in order to buy more stocks. I use Interactive Brokers and their interest rate is ridiculously low at around 1.5% so even with my conservative stocks, I can earn more money than that quite easily through dividend payments. Except now, I’ve just…
Sunk cost is an interesting concept to think about and can actually be applied to many areas of life. It economic terms, it’s a past cost that has already been lost and can’t be recovered. In investing, people (including me!) often make mistakes, but the true mistake is letting emotions get involved and not being able to handle sunk costs well. For example. I bought 10 shares of XYZ company at $100 on an insider…
One of my friends recently asked me what I thought of marijuana stocks and if they would be a good investment. It was a good question since marijuana is now legal in some American states and the market will probably be expanding quite rapidly, especially if other states follow suit and legalize it. There’s definitely money to be made, but my answer was, “No, not now” and here are my reasons: 1. There likely isn’t…
These past few months, I’ve been saving my money and just using the dividends I’m receiving to pay off my margin loan because I think the market is quite high now and due for a correction. I also haven’t added any new positions or purchased any shares of the stocks I already hold for the same reason. Except now, I’ve basically paid off my margin loan, my emergency fund is fully funded and I’m just…
The often-quoted model of how retirement works is that you need to save up a huge chunk of money which you invest in stocks and bonds, and upon quitting work, you can withdraw up to 4% of it per year and in theory, it should last you until you die. I don’t hate this model, but it seems to me that it’s kind of outdated for the following reasons: 1. People are living a lot…
When I talk to friends and acquaintances about investing and personal finance related things, one of the questions that I’m often asked is about what kinds of companies I hold stock in. I list things like Mcondalds, Chevron, Pfizer and Wal-mart and one of the comments is inevitably, “Those companies are evil and harmful to the world!” My short answer is that nothing is black and white and that the world I live in is…
I was just listening to the Suze Orman Show on Podcast and she was talking about how she prefers stocks to real estate when it comes to investing. I most definitely agree with her, and my reasoning is exactly the same as hers. By real estate investing, I’m not referring to the house that you live in, but additional ones that you buy and rent out to others. When you have real estate, it comes…
June 2014 was by far my best month since starting this blog in November 2013: $604.57. Check out the report here, but you can see that Squidoo and dividend payments were both really high, and Amazon and Iherb were around average. Dividends fluctuate throughout the year, depending on various factors and it’s really something I have no control over. But, Squidoo did very well for me and the best part about it was that I…
A simple way to estimate the time it will take for a sum of money to double is to use the rule of 72. Basically, you divide 72 by the interest rate, per year and the result is the number of years it will take for your money to double. For example: $10 000 invested at a 3% interest rate will take 24 years to become $20 000. Invested at 8%, it will take 9…
A mistake that beginning investors often make is going to a stock screener like Finviz and then simply searching for the stocks with the highest dividend yields, which in some cases are 10 or even 20%. If you buy shares of a certain stock worth $2000, it seems pretty fabulous to get dividends worth $200 (10% yield) or $400 (20% yield) every year. It seems like you’re make our original money back in 5 or…
I’m a long-term investor, which means that I’m more worried about what my dividend stock portfolio is going to look like in 10 or 20 or 30 years from now than I am about it in this current year. I know that there are lots of people who look at the market news and their brokerage account every single day and are paying attention to even little fluctuations in value. I would consider many of…
