April’21 – Monthly Passive Income update!

Hi there!

The warmer weather that we saw in early April was unfortunately short and we are still seeing single digit temperatures in mid of May! Being an optimistic, I had planted several vegetable and fruit plants in the backyard and they all shivered and perished in colder weather and now I am looking for late May to replant, and I etched a note in my mind – no planting till you are certain on warmer weather!

The second (..or third) wave of Covid is wreaking havoc back in India where daily cases are upwards of 400K and several nations are extending a helping hand with vaccines, kits, oxygens and monetary help; please support if you can too! Canada especially Ontario is still playing the lockdown game but it is heartening to see vaccination drive picked up and I myself got it last week. Hoping we will be able to tame the pandemic and there will be no further waves and things returning back to normal. Until then, please avoid crowd and follow the local protocols, it had been 15 months and we can wait few more months for the safety of mankind!

Our monthly update begins with updating below two pages with the latest data:

• 2025 Goal tracker on homepage – Again an overall negative income because of more expenses than earnings, two months in a row!
• Dividend Portfolio with latest holdings

Passive Income Pie

Monthly Dividend Earnings

We are slowly inching towards a very important milestone of hitting $200,000 valuation and hopefully if all goes well, we shall achieve it in 2021! Key points from this month’s dividend income are:

• We received dividend deposits from total 20 companies (18 Canadian & 2 US), with total value of $984.50, a record breaking dividend month for us!
• For ease and simplification, I assume 1 USD = 1 CAD
• Top 3 dividend contributors were CIBC (obviously!) followed by GoEasy & Telus!
• We dripped 12.9 shares in total – 4.91 CIBC, 2 Telus and 1 each for Alaris, Algonquin, Diversified Royalty, Pizza Pizza, Plaza REIT & Transcontinental
• Received an increased dividend from GoEasy 46.67% and Saratoga 2.4%
• Monthly average for 2021 dividends so far is $649.89 OR about $22 a day!

Dividend Goal Tracker – Planned vs Actual

Achieved 31% of this year’s goal against targeted 33%, which is $2600 out of total $8500 aimed. I am deliberately allocating more of the new funds towards growth stocks and hence I do expect slippage in achieving this year’s dividend target. Hence I may have to revisit the goal towards the end of third quarter.

My Marketplace

Wife secretly saved some money over last few months and as soon as I came to know about it, I convinced her to invest rather than keeping in some saving account with depressing interest rate. She still have tons of contribution room under her TFSA and hence she gave me $2500 to take care of.

I could have gone safe route with a dividend stock but then decided to go with Newtopia Inc (CVE:NEWU), it is a Canadian healthcare company offering virtual habit change platform. They leverages precision health tools including genetic testing and behavioral evaluations, to develop and implement personalized programs combining the human behavior with the digital interaction. They partners with insurers and employers and focuses its efforts on employees or members at risk of developing chronic diseases, including but not limited to obesity, type two diabetes, heart disease, stroke or fatty liver disease. Its personalized program focuses to manage five primary metabolic risk factors of chronic disease, including body mass index (BMI), blood pressure, blood glucose, triglycerides and cholesterol. The Company’s enterprise technology platform converges genetic testing and social and behavioral science with online human coaching and a mobile platform, wireless tracking devices, personalized gamification and a social health network.

We bought 4250 shares at 0.55 a piece, and at the time of writing this update, we are already in red but I have faith in this and can have patience. I also kept accumulating more of CIBC shares as part of my regular RRSP contribution through my payroll clubbed with Employee Share Purchase Plan.

Like March, I again bought $500 worth of Bitcoin bringing the total allocation to $4000 and it is currently valued around $5000! With all the hype and excitement around Dogecoin, I couldn’t hold myself from buying it a bit ($1000) in mid April and keeping up with my expectation (..and tons of luck), it doubled in no time! At the time of writing this post, I took out my initial capital leaving the remaining $1000 to ride or perish! By the way, Elon Musk’s appearance in SNL saw Dogecoin slide by 20% in an hour, talk about volatility! This whole space is extremely risky and speculative and I won’t recommend it to anybody, this is about of our 3% portfolio and fun money. I won’t be too stressed if I lose the entire money, which I highly doubt. I do not even track our cryptocurrency holdings as part of our portfolio but things may change if the valuation increases more than $10000!

Rental Earnings

Principal residence – We received the legal basement permit back in Feb and a contractor was lined up to begin work but we hit an obstacle as hydro cable is running across the entrance path! I put in another request with the hydro company and they took almost 2 months just to schedule the meter movement, in the name of Covid (..it’s frustrating but what can you do!). Finally the movement is scheduled now and hopefully work will start mid-May. The contractor also raised the price by 10%, thanks to lumber and other materials price increase, again the blame goes to supply chain impact due to pandemic. The original estimate was about $50,000 which now will be $55,000 plus taxes and appliances cost. Once the unit it ready we could look forward to rent it out for $1,200 a month, which is about 20% annual return and at the same time should increase the property valuation by $125,000 easily. We are looking at total cost for this house at $825,000 with market value of about $1M, not bad for 1 year of hard work that went into planning and execution for this property!

Investment property 1 – We finally found a suitable basement tenant and were able to get into positive cash flow after dwindling since Feb’21 when previous tenant left. We even had to reduce the upstairs rent by 15% because of Covid hardship. With no surprise expenses, we could rake in about $500 a month from this property and let the property value appreciate.

Investment property 2 – After bleeding money towards mortgages, taxes & expenses since Feb’21, topped with top-down renovations, the house is sold and up for closing by end of May’21. If you had followed our earlier posts, this house is was bought at equal partnership with my real estate agent back in Jan’20, was on rent for about a year and when the tenant left, we spent 2 months renovating and not to mention lot of money. Not going into all the details again as I have mentioned in my previous posts, we both will double our original down payment amount in 1.5 years, again not a shabby return.

We have had great returns in real estate in last 8 years when we invested in 5 different properties, thanks to GTA real estate bull run! After the sale of property 2, we will still be left with two houses and are invested in four different pre-construction condos in partnership with my agent and friends. We feel we should take a bit of a break from real estate investment and focus on other opportunities. Hence we are looking to deploy the proceeds from the property sale towards two different businesses in partnership with friends as silent partners! More on this in next month’s update, all I can say for now is we are super excited and also scared as it is an uncharted territory and we have no experience but we always wanted to diversify our earnings. 🤞🏻

Lending Interest Earnings

As I mentioned last month, we received back most of the principal from the only outstanding loan and hence our lending earnings is drying up except Lending loop for which I have under $25 of monthly interest from various commitments. This month we received $18 in interest. We may (..or may not) revisit private lending once we refinance one of our property, this is surely a no-brainer passive income source and you can read more on how to start here where I wrote about first steps on lending!

We continued our new year’s resolution of sharing our good fortune in a measured approach, wherein we aim to giveaway 10% of our previous year’s passive income towards a good cause. I document our monthly giveaways here at Sharing with Society and feels so happy and glad to see we are much ahead with our plans on this front! I personally also decided to express more gratitude and appreciation towards the little things in life that I feel blessed with and enjoy, but is mostly taken for granted. While I normally document it at this link – Gratitude & Goodness, I haven’t gotten a chance to update it lately but I hope to resume it soon.

This is a wrap for now and please do subscribe using the widget at the bottom of the page to get monthly 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! 😊