Hi there!
Can’t believe we are already in the last leg of summer and it started getting a bit chilly towards the end of August! Thankfully we extracted the most out of the warmer days, either by going out to places (..mostly during the weekdays to avoid the crowd), or just relaxing in the backyard. This year we spent a lot of time in our backyard, either in the pool or gardening – harvesting tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, beetroots, cucumbers and potatoes (.. yeah you got that right!!). We enjoyed it so much this year that we want to take this to a whole new level next season, we would love to be self sustained with vegetables for few weeks if not entire summer. While it is much colder now at the time of writing, the political scene is heating up with elections coming up on 20-Sept. What I have learned over the years of my adulthood is that in politics you do not get all good things in just one party so you will have to compromise with the one which aligns the most with your ideology. At times your local candidate will be awesome but the party they belong to may have matching goals. Think about how the current government faired on concerning areas such as healthcare, inflation, economics, fiscal health of the country, taxation, future of the country, benefits and go vote them back in or vote them out based on your assessment. My recommendation would be to go with the best option you have but don’t skip the process altogether, do go and vote for the best candidate.
July was a special month for us since we hit 4 figures of dividends for the first time ever! On the other hand it was also the month when one of our tenant stopped paying us rent (..thanks to Covid! 🙄). In August I also wrapped up and submitted my interview questionnaire for Hard Bacon and now eagerly waiting for them to polish and publish it. For those who aren’t aware, we were mentioned by Hard Bacon website in their list of 25 Best Financial Independence and Early Retirement Blogs In Canada For 2021 and they also asked us if we would be interested for an interview for their readers, which we gladly agreed to. In case you missed on our previous monthly updates, you can read them all here. Coming to this month’s updates, it begins by updating below two pages with the latest data:
- 2025 Goal tracker on homepage – Overall passive income for the year is taking a toll due to negative cashflow with our rental property!
- Dividend Portfolio with latest holdings
Passive Income Pie
This month, our passive income comprised of 74% of rental income, 23% Dividends & 3% in Interests from Lending loop & Celsius. For our long time readers, you know already that our financial independence pursuit is fueled primarily by these 3 categories of income and new readers can read our past monthly updates to know about our journey. Our aspirational passive income split shall look like below:
- Rental Income – 45% – $3000 per month
- Dividends – 40% – $2500 per month
- Lending Interest – 15% – $1000 per month
The above split is carefully put together as our 2025 financial goals which is based on the foundation of diversified and sustainable passive incomes. We are currently working on two more semi-passive income ideas and will write about them once they shape up better. Also after we start seeing some cash flow from these businesses, I will also revise our 2025 goals and update the diversity pie.
Monthly Dividend Earnings
After attaining an all time monthly dividend highs in July’21, August floored us with our lowest dividend month for this year (.. in fact lowest in last 15 months!). This was due to closing our positions in AT&T & Saratoga in past months. While it is disheartening to see a slump, it is a reminder that we need to work even harder and grow our portfolio – point noted and now we need to find that extra money to invest!
Key points from this month’s dividend income are:
- We received dividend deposits from total 15 entities (11 Canadian, 3 US & 1 ETF), with total value of $169.07, a 7% decrease from Aug’20
- For ease and simplicity, I consider 1 USD = 1 CAD
- Top 3 dividend contributors were Pembina, Abbvie and Pizza Pizza
- We dripped 3 shares in total – one each for Diversified Royalty, Pizza Pizza and Plaza REIT
- We received one dividend raise from A&W – 11.11%
- Average monthly dividends for 2021 so far is $560.25 Or about $18.675 a day. By 2025, we wish to reach about $80 a day, long long way to go!
Dividend Goal Tracker – Planned vs Actual
In eight months of 2021, we achieved 53% of this year’s dividend goal against targeted 66%. With just four months to go, we are lagging behind quite significantly with our 2021 dividend goal and may not be able to achieve it. This is mainly due to our refocus on growth stocks and two business interests where we are diverting a lot of funds, which was otherwise earmarked for dividend portfolio. I will revisit the 2025 dividend goals some time later this year (.. or early next year) to revise the dividend goals and again next year to include business earnings as part of our overall passive income.
My Marketplace
There was no Buy or Sell in August and this buying and holding forever (.. well unless something goes terribly wrong!) bodes well with our investment philosophy. We are currently in accumulation phase and all we want is to keep buying quality stocks and build a significant portfolio to live off, years away from now.
This doesn’t mean we had no excitement at all! As I mentioned earlier we did DRIP 3 shares and also accumulated 9 more shares of CIBC as part of employee share purchase plan under monthly RRSP contribution via payroll deductions. These new acquisitions will contribute about $54 more towards our forward annual dividend yield. I know this is quite small and insignificant amount but as the saying goes and I strongly believe in – Individually we are one drop, together we are an ocean!
This month, we did not put any new money in Crypto either. If you have followed us, you may know we hold little bit of Bitcoin between two wallets – CoinSquare & Celsius (which also pays weekly interests on your holdings, isn’t that nice?!). Feel free to sign-up using my Celcius network referral and we both can earn $50 in Bitcoins once you transfer $400 or more. I also had a fun-trade couple of months ago with Dogecoin and whatever left in our CoinSquare account is free money, will let it ride or perish! Within last one month, Bitcoin increased about 30% and my other holding Dogecoin raised more than 50% but our overall valuation haven’t reached $10K that I formally start tracking cryptocurrencies under our portfolio.
Right now we are financially recuperating from the debt we put on ourselves for basement renovation and shall take few months before we are in a “healthy” state. Once we are there, I want to work on at least two areas on priority – 1. Create a plan to reduce the big gap we currently have for our TFSA contribution 2. Create a regular crypto investment plan
Rental Earnings
Principal residence – While minor touch-ups are still pending here and there, the basement is now registered legally and rented out. I am so glad that after spending 6 figures in renovation and almost one year of hardship, this property is ready for some cash flow. The one bedroom unit is rented for $1200 monthly which is a bit on low for such units but we chose to rent out to a couple as they are out working most of the week and don’t own a car. This means, we save on utilities, have minimum interference, and don’t have to broaden the driveway yet. It was a win-win situation and so far we are glad we rented them the basement.
Investment property 1 – This upstairs tenant defaulted on the rent starting July and Landlord-Tenant board of Ontario gave us 10-Nov date for the eviction hearing. By then it would be 5 months of rent non-payment and the whole experience screams overhauling of the process to help both parties. I hope one day, the concerned board wakes up and improve on the timeframe it takes and the process in general to avoid sheer waste of time and inefficiencies! For now, we are impatiently waiting for the hearing and bleeding money. 🥲
The proceed from investment property mortgage refinancing and investment 2 property sale are used to fund part ownership in two businesses and I will write more on them once we are in a better shape. For now, all I can say is a lot goes into planning and execution for such projects with significant risk and reward at play. More on this to come in coming months.. Stay tuned.
Lending Interest Earnings
We collected about $15 in interest from lending loop on our initial investment of $2000. You can also explore this option for relatively smaller capital and if you invest, we both can earn $25 each using my lending loop referral ink, once you invest $1,500 on their platform.
We also earned about $3.5 in interests for keeping our Bitcoin on Celsius network. This was recommended by a twitter friend and after initial setup and Bitcoin transfer (partial transfer only for now) from CoinSquare, I started seeing weekly interests been deposited to my account. It is great to earn interests while the cryptocurrency is just sitting somewhere! You can signup using my Celsius network referral link when signing up and can earn $50 in BTC with your first transfer of $400 or more.
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. We have almost achieved our 2021 goals (~96%) in eight months! Please check our page sharing with society for more details and do share if you can with any of the charities or initiative we donated, it will mean a lot to us and keep in mind, even a small amount helps! 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.
That’s it for now readers and see you next month! 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, Get vaccinated and don’t forget to Save-Invest-Repeat! 😊
