Hi there!
Oh boy.. what an year to witness and tell stories to our kids and their kids! While this was an year which brought havoc and chaos to life and people witnessed times like never seen before, we had been quite blessed and fortunate by not getting affected drastically. In fact the pandemic gave me an opportunity to spend more time with my family and maintain a better work-life balance (.. well most of the time!). The lockdowns were frustrating after few weeks but we spent quality time with each other and went on long walks to unwind ourselves. If restaurants were closed, we picked up burgers and pastas to have picnic in isolation under the stars. We stayed away from outside world by spending lot of time together playing in the backyard, jumping on the trampoline, fully utilizing our inflated pool and if nothing else, drinking lots and lots of beer, yes.. even on Monday evenings and Wednesday noons! I shielded the family from outer world totally by going for groceries alone and remember the panic at Costco where aisles of toilet papers and staples were totally empty like I have never seen before. I have waited more than an hour in a queue outside Food Basics wearing a mask and plastic gloves, will admit.. it scared the crap out of me. We were so new (and confused) with the whole situation that we removed everything out of its box at the door, we washed and dried the produce before storing and we even took the pizza out of its box before bringing inside the house! Even now after almost one year, the pandemic is not contained yet but the craziness have died a bit or we are now more use to the situation. When I think about those days, it brings mixed bag of emotions and feels glad that those days are behind us!
If this pandemic brought the best in us, I tell you, it precipitated the bad in us as well; at times the constant togetherness and sight of each other in a small house was overkilling that we had to fight.. taking breaks by not talking! And during one of those short break from my wife, I thought about writing and that lead to the birth of Settling Nomad! I still remember I was lying down on our backyard trampoline and I picked up the laptop, googled about blog creating options and registered a domain name on Bluehost! It all happened in a matter of few hours and I found myself selecting a theme, drafting a homepage, writing about us, adding few pages on goals and jotting down disclaimer! In few days back in June of 2020 I published the site and osted about it on one of the facebook group. The whole idea was born out of boredom and frustration to let it all out, this is my way of stay disciplined and show commitment to our goal towards financial independence. Let’s see how long this whole thing goes but I must say, I am fully committed to the financial wellbeing of my family and I will see to it that we improve our situation every single year. The monthly updates on our passive income keeps me grounded and shows me how we are doing and what need to change. And as I said on our homepage, with this blog I also hope to inspire few people (..or at least make them think) to stay committed with their saving, investment and financial wellbeing, it is so important in a time we all are witnessing presently. We need to make the best out of this pandemic and try improving our financial situation; less outings (..especially to malls for impulse shopping) and lesser commute cost presents us an opportunity to save and invest. The more you repeat the savings and investing, the better your lives will be financially!
Below is the summary of our last year and as I see it, it hadn’t been bad at all!
After careful consideration I set our 2025 goals and while it is always a work-in-progress and adjustments will be needed, we will do everything we can to meet it if not beat the shit out of it! Highlights:
- We brought in a little over $28000 in passive (..well almost passive if not totally!) income, we aim to earn $48000 if we can
- Dividend earnings were just over $6000 and we hit the target easily, all dividends were either under TFSA & RRSP and we still have significant contribution room left under both type of accounts
- We raked in about $17000 in lending interests and this doesn’t include the expenses we incurred to earn it such as PLC interest, paperwork, lending fee etc.
- Rentals brought us net $4500 and we aim to increase this in 2021 by building a legal basement in one of our property, the net may go in negative due to cost of construction
I started investing in stocks and mutual funds via regular (paycheck and annual bonus) contributions in my personal and group RRSP accounts but we started buying dividend stocks under both TFSA and RRSP in 2018 and then focused goal oriented investing only in 2019. Over time we built our Dividend Portfolio and begin tracking the dividends religiously and the graphs begin shaping up and looking encouraging. Below is a delightful chart showing our monthly dividends for years 2019-20 and just looking at this gives me abundant satisfaction! 🙂
Here is a line graph showing our Investment vs Value, which doubled since I started tracking it back in April of 2019 till December of 2020. If looked carefully, you will see a freakish 30% plunge when Covid surged in March 2020, but then you will also notice I continued with our regular contribution all along. The dedication paid off eventually when the value of our portfolio again went up and crossed an important milestone of $150,000 for the first time ever towards end of 2020!
In 7 months of existence, this website brought in 4017 visitors with around 6500 views primarily from Canada followed by USA and India. I could enhance these metrics by pursuing more writing and aggressively hitting social media but at this point it is not my objective considering other commitment. My main purpose of blogging is to stay the course on our own financial freedom journey so I am not too keen on achieving significantly more on this front though I will spend as much time and energy as I could devote on this. As of now I aim to write 2 blogs a month out of which one will be dedicated to monthly update.
Looking back at 2020, I realize how blessed we were to have an unimpactful year and achieved a lot when the pandemic forced people to stay afloat and try to steer clear from stress and chaos. Keeping this in mind, I started writing gratitude & goodness where I express my thankfulness for people, situation and events. I am so excited for 2021 and looking forward to keep the momentum going and keep investing as per the plan and achieve our targets. I also wrote about my top three 2021 stock picks out of which I already own one and will open a position in at least one more when I get a chance. As I mentioned in my December’20 update, we will continue sharing 10% of our passive income with needy and track it under our page sharing with society.
This is a wrap to our first yearly update and I will see you next year. Please do subscribe using the widget at the bottom of the page to get regular updates, I don’t spam and you will only get an email whenever I post on this website.
Stay indoor, Stay safe and Save-Invest-Repeat. Do share with people in need and count your blessings.. Good luck! 😊