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September’21 – Side Hustle Income

Hello readers!

Hope you all are doing great. September started with mixed emotion as schools started and as we had enrolled both our kids for in-person schooling, they were gone from nearly 8AM-3PM. Since more than a year and half, I am working from home and they been around every moment – shouting, fighting, laughing, disturbing while I work and attend meetings. I so got used to their annoyance and me screaming at them every 5 seconds that suddenly they not been around is quite disheartening and sad. I really misses their sudden appearance out of nowhere and sitting on the lap quietly while I am talking to someone, they quietly lying by my side and start snoring or just stop by for a hug. I tell you, kids are wonderful!

17-Sept-21 was opening day of our restaurant in partnership with few friends. We invested $100,000 from sales proceed of our investment property. It will be a while before we break-even and start seeing some profit so I won’t be tracking it officially till then. We are more of a silent partner but we do go there and help out when we can in whatever way and so far from our experience I can tell, managing a business full time is quite a job and is draining! Up until now, it seemed such a piece-of-cake to order food for delivery or take-out. We never thought how a guy magically appears at our doorsteps with bag full of food (..just like a Santa) OR a carry-bag ready with carefully packed food items at some restaurant for pickup. But now we understand the teamwork, coordination, effort, sweat & pain that goes into seemingly straightford and easy task. And now we have more respect towards anyone who’s part of hospitality and service industry as we know how thankless and laborious the job is to make sure customers are at comfort. Wish us luck that all the hard work pays off, one day. 🤞

I keep getting late with these monthly updates and this time I made a record, when I should be updating October numbers, I am still writing about September! It had really been a super-busy month and hope to get back on track next time onwards. Coming back to monthly updates, as usual I start by updating below two pages with 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 51% of rental income, 47% Dividends & 2% 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 look at 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 and start showing cash flow. Accordingly our diversity pie will be updated to reflect the same.

Monthly Dividend Earnings

This month we were able to earn $500+ of dividends, key points from this month’s dividend income are:

We received dividend deposits from total 22 entities (20 Canadian & 2 US), with total value of $519.51, a 4% decrease from Sept’20 due to selling of bunch of dividend payers
For ease and simplicity, I consider USD at par with CAD
Top 3 dividend contributors were Enbridge, Exxon Mobil and Fortis
We dripped 5 shares in total – two for Enbridge & one each for Diversified Royalty, Pizza Pizza and Plaza REIT
We received a whopping 5 dividend raises this month, the most ever I recall! Leading the pack is Bank of America 16.67%, OTEX 10.01%, Pizza Pizza 9.09%, CAR REIT 5.04% & lastly Diversified Royalty 4.79%. We are still getting reduced post-covid dividends from RioCan & Suncor and while Suncor is still a long term holding, I am having my doubts about RioCan as I don’t have a good feeling about commercial REIT bouncing back to its past glory.
Average monthly dividends for 2021 so far is $555.66 Or about $18.52 a day. By 2025, we aim to reach about $80 a day.

**BLACK**: Unchanged | **GREEN**: Increased | **BLUE**: Reduced | **RED**: Suspended

Dividend Goal Tracker – Planned vs Actual

**BLUE BAR**: Planned Yearly | **PINK BAR**: Actual Yearly | **GREEN LINE**: Planned Monthly | **GREEN PLOT**: Actual Monthly

After nine months of 2021, we only achieved 59% of this year’s dividend goal against targeted 75%. With just three more months left in 2021, this year’s dividend goal seems more and more difficult to attain now. There are two reasons we slipped on our goal this year – 1. Allocating less money towards stock purchase 2. Focusing more on growth stocks instead of dividend payers. After some thoughts, instead of revising the dividend goals, I decided to keep the same goal for this year and next and will allocate more money now onwards to make up for the lag. We invested a significant amount of money this year in two different business interests with our friends and it will take awhile before we see some cash flow from them. I will revisit our 2025 dividend goals once we are clear on the earnings.

My Marketplace

We topped up our Manulife holding this month by buying 18 new shares with the accumulated dividends in one of our account, this will increase our projected annual dividend income (PADI) by $20.16. We also kept nibbling at CIBC stocks as part of employee share purchase program and increased our overall portfolio by about 4 more shares which will also contribute $22.98 towards our annual dividend income. Our share drips this month will also add towards our annual dividend – 2 shares of Enbridge: $6.68, 1 share of Diversified: $0.21, 1 share of Pizza Pizza: $0.72 and finally 1 share of Plaza REIT: $0.2796. All these buys, accumulation & drips will increase our total annual dividend income to $51.

We did not buy any Crypto this month but have been enjoying the 30% month over month ride of Bitcoin and last week it hit its all time high! We hold some 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.

As I mentioned last month and in some other previous monthly updates, we have accumulated some debts in last one year to build a legal basement and invest in business opportunities. We would like to get ourselves in a bit comfortable situation with our cash flow and then would like to focus on 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 – Our legal basement started earning rent for us after 4 months of sweat, dust and money! We collected $1200 in rent which help us pay back the accumulated debt and its interest, it is not a lot but every bit helps and in a long run this should pay off. While this is not a positive cash flow, I am counting it towards the rent as it is still an earning.

Investment property 1 – As our readers may know, the upstairs tenant defaulted on the rent starting July and Landlord-Tenant board of Ontario gave us 10-Nov date for the eviction hearing. We are impatiently waiting for this whole depressing saga to get over and get a favourable verdict because we are bleeding a lot of money and we had to dip into our line of credit and pay interest on it, while the tenant conveniently chose not to pay the rent that they contractually signed and bound to, we still have to pay the mortgage, property tax, utilities, they don’t stop.

As you may know, we refinanced this property in August and the proceed went into two different business interests. I will create a separate section for business income once it is in a better shape. 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 $7 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 beat our 2021 goals in nine months itself and would like to thank my wife who contributed more than me and thank the almighty to make us capable! 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! 😊

Our Top 3 Picks – US Dividend Stocks

14-Oct-2114-Oct-21RLeave a comment

At the beginning of 2021, Bob (..from TawCan.com) approached me to contribute for an article which he was working on to list down best Canadian dividend/growth stocks. The ask from me and 17 other Dividend Growth Investors (DGI) was simply to pick our top 3 stocks and provide reasoning! His article took a great shape and became a go to post for beginners to find good stocks, it can be read here – Best Canadian Dividend Stocks. It was my first time collaborating with such masters and in order to come up with my picks, I took a methodical approach which is documented here in my own blog here at 2021 Top 3 Picks – Canadian Dividend Growth.

My top 3 picks for his article back in Jan’21 were GoEasy Financials, Kirkland Lake Gold Ltd & Agnico Eagle Mines and my selection was purely based on dividend growth data for recent past years (one and three). The last dividend raise for Agnico was astonishing 75% while Kirkland raised theirs’ by 50% and GoEasy gave a handsome 45.16% raise! All 3 companies dividend growth were amongst the top and it is worth mentioning that since then GoEasy again raised their dividend by whopping 46.67%. Even if you look at their average three years dividend growth percentage, they are quite envious. In terms of price appreciation, GoEasy lead the pack by YTD increase of 92% (163% in last 1 year!), Kirkland by 1% & Agnico decreased by 25%. If I had invested $10,000 in each of these 3 stocks, my value at the time of writing would have been about $37,000, an increase of 23%. It is a good return by all means but if I had to redo this, I wouldn’t choose 2 gold stocks. Gold miners/stocks have suffered in the last one year due to declining gold prices from the peak of Aug’20 amidst pandemic uncertainty by almost 25%. A bank or an utility company would have been a better choice. For the records, I only got a chance to buy GoEasy (..talk about getting lucky!) and we have doubled our money so far. There was also an announcement coming out in late Sept that Agnico is buying Kirkland Gold for $13.5 billion!

Bob contacted me again few weeks ago and this time he wanted to work on a similar article, but focusing on US based stocks! Again I am both nervous and excited as these exercises are quite enriching and a great learning experience. US stock exchanges – NYSE & NASDAQ are top 2 exchanges in the world in terms of market capitalization while Canada’s own TSX sits at the distant 9th spot. These two US exchanges lists more than 6500 companies with about 35 trillion dollars (give or take) market valuation; TSX in comparison is about 2 trillion dollars only. Given these many stocks to pick from, the task is quite daunting and intimidating but I recall long time ago someone telling me a very basic thing about stock selection – Look around for products/services you use daily and buy the companies that provide them! The idea is quite fundamental yet very strong, imagine a company manufacturing your toothpaste or supplying you electricity/gas or medicines you need or the phone you use or car you drive. These companies are so penetrated in everyday life that it is hard for them to go out of business, even if the consumer usage habit or the rule changes, these companies will adapt and innovate to remain in the business. So.. my approach for this exercise is based on this principle and hence is quite simpler than methodically weeding out stocks based on their fundamentals or dividend data. I am just going to pick 3 different sectors and talk about my favourite stocks from each of them. For now I am going to go with Technology, Financial & Pharmaceutical sectors and these stocks I bet are worldwide household names, especially in ours!

Technology – Apple

If you haven’t heard about Apple Inc then you are probably from a different planet! Apple was founded on 1-Apr-76 and they started their journey building personal computers (..called Macintosh back then) and back then spawned into Camera, Gaming console, Clothing line (wow.. can you believe it!) & iPod to survive! In present world they sells Macbook, iPad, iWatch, Airpods, etc but rules the consumer electronics space worldwide with their iPhones. They have sold nearly 2 billion phones so far with 1 billion active users currently and recently launched the latest iPhone 13 model. In 1985 Steve Jobs was oust from Apple as CEO but was brought back in 1997 when the company was in dire financial situation. And just in 14 years Jobs turned the company’s fortune around with his vision, dedication and ruthless leadership launching one successful product after another focusing on design aesthetics and ease of usage; and in 2011 Apple had more cash than the US treasury!

Source: Boston Consulting Group’s annual ranking

A successful company needs a deep pocket to spend on innovation and research, so they keep churning out unique product or service for its customer base. As per Boston Consulting Group, Apple singlehandedly ruled the innovation landscape since 2005 till 2021, not under its hometurf of Technology & Telecommunication sector but also amongst all other sectors.

Apple is also the biggest company in the world in terms of market-cap and the first company to attain every market-cap milestones so far – be it $500 billion or $1 trillion or $2 trillion and now sits at the top with about $2.38 trillion valuation. Apple is followed by Microsoft, Google, Amazon & Facebook in terms of companies valuation and in last 5 years, Apple beats them all in price appreciation of about 400%, quite a returns on investment for its shareholders! The dividend yield is 0.62% with dividend payout ratio of 27% and the last 5 years dividend growth rate is 9.30%

In our home, in total we possess six devices and few more which aren’t used anymore. Even if you go outside and look around, you will surely notice every other person using an iPhone, so with such widespread usage it only makes sense to own a piece of this mammoth of a company!

Financial – Visa

VISA Inc is another such company which you will find in almost every wallet or pocket in the world! It is an American multinational financial services corporation and one of the world’s most valuable companies, which facilitates electronic funds transfers throughout through Visa-branded credit, debit and prepaid cards. Visa do not issue any card by themselves, rather they provides financial institutions with Visa-branded payment products that they then use to offer variety of cards. They IPO’d in 2008 and back then it was the largest IPO in history at $17.9 billion! Visa have about 2.5 billion cards boring their brand name earning transaction fees for them every time their card is swiped/tapped/inserted anywhere and as per 2020 data, a whopping $8.8 trillion transactions were processed by them with net revenue for Visa of $22 billion!

Visa’s competitors are Mastercard, American Express, Discover and many other small players but their main challenger is Mastercard. You will find plenty of articles all over the internet comparing these two companies and choosing one over the other; but my leaning is more towards Visa considering widespread usage in our household. I recall my first debit card had a VISA logo on it and I wondered why as the card belonged to a local bank. Looking at all our current cards, the count is like 8-2 in favour of VISA and the ones belonging to Mastercard are Costco & Walmart cards, with which they have contract! In the last 5 years, Visa stock price appreciated about 170% with dividend yield of 0.58% with dividend payout ratio of 25% and the last 5 years dividend growth rate is 18%

Covid changed the way world shop and pays which in all likeliness is going to stick around now. More and more people are shopping online and if not, at least avoid using cash and this change in behaviour is obviously boosting card payment and hence increase in related transaction fee. More so I read somewhere, the pandemic boosted debit card usage a lot by consumers who preferred cash earlier, and VISA’s debit card programs and penetration is bigger as compared to Mastercard and hence I believe VISA is a good choice.

Pharmaceutical – Abbvie

Abbvie Inc is an American biopharmaceutical company spinned off Abbott Laboratories in 2013 and hence is a relatively young company. After the split, Abbott takes care of medical devices, diagnostic equipments & nutrition products and AbbVie operate as a research-based pharmaceutical manufacturer & seller. Abbvie’s infamous product Humira (..which is used to treat Rheumatoid arthritis, Psoriatic arthritis and Crohn’s disease) is the number one selling drug in the world since 2015! Last year it brought in nearly $20 billion revenue for Abbvie while the second highest selling drug Eliquis made nearly $10 billion for their parent company, so you can judge how mammoth Humira is for Abbvie! While patent for Humira is expiring in different parts of the world, US patent is going to expire in early 2023 and until then there is no doubt Humira will rule Abbvie’s revenue charts and even a bit after that as it may take a while before other companies catchup and brings in biosimilars in the market. Abbvie majorly have 16 products selling in international market and many others in either research pipeline or acquisition plan, last year itself the company acquired Allergan, manufacturer of Botox for about $63 billion.

Abbvie have been consistent with the return on investment for its shareholders, ever since its inception. In last 5 years, Abbvie stock price appreciated about 80% with a juicy dividend yield of 4.79% with dividend payout ratio of 49% and the last 5 years dividend growth rate is 18%. With this kind of yield and a solid past record, Abbvie qualify as a long term stock to hold, at least for me.

Just like Apple & Visa products that are widely used in our household by choice, unfortunately Abbvie was also a company whose product I used in the past! Probably readers know, I am a Crohns disease patient (..or shall I say veteran!) and I have used Humira for more than 5 years.

Key Metrics

Below are some of the metrics I collected for readers from various websites and may be a bit off or stale, so please do check the latest. The focus is mainly on past price appreciation and dividend growth.

Also below is the chart showing Apple, Visa & Abbvie growth in last 5 years.

Conclusion

US market is so huge that picking just 3 stocks is like looking for a needle in a haystack even for professional analysts. I am no analyst and hence I chose 3 safe and boring blue chip stocks with proven track record and dominant position in their respective field. They all are well positioned to survive and grow for at least next few decades and even if the market demand, usage pattern, local rule changes or if they encounter a disrupter, they are all well capable to adapt or acquire to changing landscape. They all are relatively safe companies with no surprise elements and shall benefit their shareholders with double-digits return over years to come along with increased dividends.

We currently own a little bit of both Apple & Abbvie under our dividend portfolio and shall add Visa as well when we get a chance.

Happy Investing and Good luck with whatever you buy! 😊

August’21 – Slow month = Work harder!

19-Sep-2119-Sep-21RLeave a comment

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 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.

Stay indoor, Stay safe, Get vaccinated and don’t forget to Save-Invest-Repeat! 😊

July’21 – First ever 4 figures dividend – Passive Income Update!

11-Aug-2111-Nov-21RLeave a comment

Hello reader!

Hope your summer is going great, healthy and stress free, accomplishing whatever you planned to do. Enjoy the warm weather and minimal covid cases, while it lasts. As I told you last month, we had planned for 10 days of Quebec trip and it was awesome! ..to be back travelling and visiting places. June was also one of our most exciting and satisfying month from many perspective, do read our monthly updates here if you missed it. As far as our visit goes, this time we spent almost a day each at Saint-Sauveur, Mont-Tremblant, Valcartier waterpark, Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, Saint-Laurent-Ile-d’Orleans island, Montmorency Falls, Quebec City (.. went there twice actually!), Zoo de Granby. Each of these small towns in Quebec are picturesque; the churches, old heritage buildings with stunning architecture, boutiques, narrow alleys, restaurants packed with patrons oozing an European charm. My whole family is especially in love with the old Quebec city and we have made an unwritten rule to visit this city every other year, if possible. While returning back home we also stayed couple of nights in Ottawa, our nation’s capital, relaxing and sightseeing . We in fact took a city bus tour (..for the first time in our life!) and I can tell you from this ride that Ottawa is a lot beautiful than I thought. Hands-down, 24 Sussex Drive is literally nothing as compared to the White house and I felt even the residence of US ambassador to Canada is better than our prime ministers! 😉

This was a much needed break for all of us and thankfully it was incident free. We didn’t say it but we all were so exhausted living this pandemic imposed confinement for so long. We are not made for lockdown and fearful lifestyle, this whole pandemic episode makes us realize how much we took small joys for granted. Who knew, one day we will have to think twice before heading out, take precautions such as masks, sanitizers and avoid people. It teaches us to be grateful to what we have and enjoy life to the fullest. Every place we visited last month, we saw bustling crowd living in the moment and enjoying life, far away from the fear and worry.

Back to monthly update business which as usual begins with 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 98% dividends and 2% from lending loop interest, there was negative rental income and hence not reported. Please read our past monthly updates and from it, you will know that our aspirational passive income split is as below:

Rental Income – 45% – $3000 per month
Dividends – 40% – $2500 per month
Lending Interest – 15% – $1000 per month

Our 2025 financial goals 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. Once we start seeing some cash flow from these businesses, I will also revise our 2025 goals and update the diversity pie.

Monthly Dividend Earnings

This is the first month when we crossed $1000 milestone in monthly dividends! With CIBC being a big portion of our portfolio, unless we make drastic change to it, with every CIBC dividend months (Jan-Apr-Jul-Oct) going forward, we will keep hitting new highs. Key points from this month’s dividend income are:

We received dividend deposits from total 20 entities (18 Canadian, 1 US & 1 ETF), with total value of $1000.52, a 31% increase from Jul’20
For ease and simplification, I assume 1 USD = 1 CAD
Top 3 dividend contributors were CIBC, Telus and GoEasy
We dripped 10.5 shares in total – 4.5 shares for CIBC & 1 each for Alaris, Algonquin, Diversified Royalty, Pizza Pizza, Plaza REIT and Telus
We received dividend raise from Algonquin – 10%, Telus – 1.6% & Whitecap resources – 7.75%
Average monthly dividends for 2021 so far is $616 Or about $20.34 a day. By 2025, we need to reach about $85 a day, long long way to go!

Dividend Goal Tracker – Planned vs Actual

In seven months of 2021, we achieved 51% of this year’s dividend goal against targeted 58%. The gap between planned and actual is increasing with each passing month and as I have mentioned before, this is due to our recent focus on growth stocks which often do not pays dividend. This is a deliberate move as we have a long horizon before we wish to retire and live off dividends. I will revisit the 2025 dividend goals some time later this year and shall revise to make it more realistic and achievable, if needed.

My Marketplace

Like most months, we did not sell anything this month as well. On the other hand, again as usual, we kept accumulating more of CIBC shares as part of regular RRSP contribution through my payroll deduction. If your employer offers Employee Share Purchase Plan and you are not enrolled, you need to start now.. can’t stress enough, don’t leave free money on the table.

We had some dividends accumulated under different accounts, which we used to increase our position in two different companies – Palantir technologies & Sylogist limited. We first bought Palantir back in May’21 and I wrote about it in the respective monthly update, this time we added 4 more shares (.. yeah I know it is miniscule but keep in mind – Little drops of water make the mighty ocean). Palantir is a potential growth stock with no dividend payments and hence no increase to our projected annual dividend income.

Our affair with Sylogist goes back to the days when we didn’t even had this blog! We first bought Sylogist in Dec’19 and so far we have gained 34% in share price and 44% if we factor-in the collected dividends. Sylogist Ltd is a Canadian software company, providing ERP solutions in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and internationally offering variety of solutions to Public sector, Non-profit and non-governmental organizations, Education boards, as well as districts, defense, and safety contractors. Sylogist was incorporated in 1993 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada. I still remember I bought this company on Motley Fool’s recommendation and they appeared in their “best buy” dividend stocks back then.

We did not put any new money in Crypto this month and I was a just a mute but elated spectator to the rising prices after brutal couple of months. Both of my crypto holdings increased significantly, while Bitcoin price gained 32% in last one month, Dogecoin appreciated 19% in the same timeframe. I love twitter as we connect with like-minded people and compare notes, do follow us and share your knowledge and experience, our twitter handle is SettlingNomads! One of my twitter buddy recommended Celsius network, they pays you interest while your crypto is sitting idle and you can even get a loan based on your underlying asset. They pays weekly interest (on Mondays) and so far I have received $1.50 already, not bad considering my initial investment (.. actually existing Bitcoin transferred from CoinSquare) was just $500. But in coming days I will transfer more of my cryptos here and earn interests and promo money. I also received $40 as a referral bonus as twitter friend referred me. If you are interested to test the water, please join using my Celsius network referral link when signing up and earn $50 in BTC with your first transfer of $400 or more.

Rental Earnings

Principal residence – The legal basement construction completed with minor touch-ups pending. Month wise work accomplishment were:

May

Electric meter movement from back of the house to side
Electrical panel upgrade from 100 to 200 AMP
Separate backyard entrance built (steps, door, railing)
Internal framing
Plumbing rough-ins
HVAC
Foundational electrical work
Wall insulation

June

Tiles installation
Hardwood flooring
Drywall installation
Mudding and taping
Painting

July

Door installation and painting
Trimming
Kitchen cabinets fixture
Plumbing work – Taps, Sinks, Shower, Vanity etc installation
Electrical work – Switches, Plugs, Potlights, Lights, Alarms etc
Finally appliances installation – Laundry, Stove, Refrigerator

Final inspection successfully completed along with occupancy certificate and as I mentioned last month, we had a potential tenant who took the place for rent from the beginning of this month. While the rent will not cover the mortgage but it will surely help with the mandatory expenses related to the property and we are happy to have this additional money.

Investment property 1 – This property is giving me sleepless nights and this is the first time I am having so much trouble with just one tenant. As I mentioned last month, the upstairs tenant reported a temporary job loss due to Covid and stopped paying the rent. We are now in second month of no rent payment and have initiated eviction process but as I understand from many landlords facing similar situation, we are facing many months (..if not years) of non-payment of rent! While I totally understand personal hardship due to job loss, I feel in this situation, the tenant is just milking the situation and trying to benefit out of strict tenant favouring rules in Ontario. We are eagerly waiting to hear back from the board with a hearing date and will take it from there.

Hard, unwarranted and frustrating but definitely not end of the world! This whole fiasco is taking my passive earning forecast for a turbulent ride and the only solace is basement rent is coming and covering approximately one-third of the expenses. Also, July was our last month of mortgage payment at one bank and we refinanced with another. At the time of writing, the formality and transaction between them completed and we see the balance money available for us to deploy elsewhere. 😇

As I mentioned in my Jun’21 updates, we sold our investment property 2 and do read for the details on sale breakdown and profit figures. We have the money available to invest in couple of potential business opportunities with friends as partners. There wasn’t much of an activity in July but do have some updates for August to write about! Stay tuned..

Lending Interest Earnings

Not bothering to even change any text here because as usual, we collected $18 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 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 feel happy to share that we are already close to achieve our goal just in seven 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 me 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.

Stay indoor, Stay safe, Get vaccinated and don’t forget to Save-Invest-Repeat! 😊

June’21 – Super Exciting Month – Passive Income Update!

17-Jul-2111-Aug-21R3 Comments

Hi there!

Hope you’ll are doing great and enjoying the warmer weather outside. Finally it looks like we are at the end of this long and dark pandemic tunnel after excruciating last 15 months of lockdown and the nagging fear. Both myself and my better half are fully vaccinated now and have even completed the two weeks of post-vaccine immunity building period and I don’t know if we really achieved the advertised 95% Pfizer efficacy, but it surely feels relaxing. With provinces opening up and relaxing the lockdown norms, we have booked our first trip since Mar’20 and are very excited to go back to Quebec for 10 days and honestly more than the beautiful Quebec, I am just looking forward to out of home for this long! This would be our second trip to the province and looking forward to explore more of it other than going to Quebec city again, the whole vibe out there is so magical.

June is a busy month in my household with our anniversary and both kids’ birthdays to celebrate, within a span of 6 days.. needless to say, almost half of the month is spent making good memories, sharing gifts, foods-drinks and at least four cakes! This year it was our 15th marriage anniversary while our elder daughter turned 11 and the younger one is now 4 years old – and she’s already looking forward to her school! This month as a whole is a reminder that how blessed I am to have a family like this, so fortunate, really! While June was indeed an exciting month and it became even more special when we achieved another important financial milestone.. our combined portfolio reached $200,000 valuation!! I have read time and again that the first hundred thousand is the most difficult one, and thereafter you will witness the power and magic of compounding and my firsthand experience bolster this statement. We achieved our first $100,000 in Jan’20 and in exactly 1.5 years, we doubled our valuation. This magic was possible with the combination of continued regular contributions, growth and DRIPs and irrespective of the stock market mayhem we encountered back in Mar’20! So one learning here is, stay the course, if you choose good quality stocks to begin with, there is nothing to worry.

While I was pretty happy and content with all the goodness June had to offer, it was quite a pleasant surprise when we got mentioned by Hard bacon. Normally we don’t have much traffic on our website during mid-month as I only write monthly updates but it suddenly increased and I later got to know on my twitter account that we appeared in their list of 25 best financial independence and early retirement blogs in Canada for 2021! They had some nice things to say about us and this is the type of encouragement that keeps me going and gives a proud feeling! Please do visit the below link to know about several brilliant bloggers and what they are going to attain financial freedom. 😊

**Hard Bacon – The 25 best financial independence and early retirement blogs in Canada for 2021**

Also excited to share that I am working on an interview questionnaire for them and it may get published in a near future! Going back to our monthly update which as usual 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

This month, our passive income comprised of 44% rental, 54% dividends, and 2% from interest, our previous monthly updates can be found here. If you are our regular reader, you will probably know our aspirational passive income split is as below:

Rental Income – 45% – $3000 per month
Dividends – 40% – $2500 per month
Lending Interest – 15% – $1000 per month

Our 2025 financial goals is based on the foundation of diversified and sustainable passive incomes. As I mentioned last month, we have decided to passively invest in two different businesses with our friends and I will provide some insight once it takes better shape formally. Once we start seeing some cash flow, I will update our diversity pie and 2025 goals as needed.

Monthly Dividend Earnings

Key points from this month’s dividend income are:

We received dividend deposits from total 22 entities (18 Canadian, 2 US & 2 ETFs), with total value of $531.22, a 12% increase from Jun’20. I am quite happy with these double digit growths considering average annual raise for regular 9-5 job in Canada is about 3%
For ease and simplification, I assume 1 USD = 1 CAD
Top 3 dividend contributors were Enbridge, Exxon Mobil and Fortis
We dripped 7 shares in total – 3 shares for Enbridge & 1 each for Diversified Royalty, Pizza Pizza, Plaza REIT and XAW
Fun fact – We received dividend increases from various companies we hold for straight 9 months but the beautiful streak is broken.. no dividend raise for us this month!
Monthly average for 2021 dividends so far is $552 Or about $18.40 a day!

Dividend Goal Tracker – Planned vs Actual

It is halfway past 2021 and so far we achieved 39% of this year’s dividend goal against targeted 50%. The planned vs. actual keeps increasing by each passing month and this is mostly due to our recent focus on growth and non-dividend paying stocks. This is a deliberate move as we have a relatively long horizon before we wish to retire and live off dividends. I haven’t done the projection yet but upcoming July & Oct are my golden months for dividends and I expect to break $1000 monthly mark for both these months and they will surely help us narrow the gap. I may still have to revisit the 2020 goal towards the end of third quarter but I hope not to fall too short with it.

I am a long term reader of tawcan and Bob recently published two parts interview with one of his reader who along with his wife lives off dividends since 2004 and while they started with a modest amount back in 1985, now their combined portfolio generates a whopping annual dividends of $360,000.. yes you read that right! Both part-1 and part-2 interviews have tremendous learnings and I must have read them several times and took notes. One key learning for me was to exhaust TFSA limits and only put enough in RRSP to grab my employer’s contribution. I am pretty much sold on this idea from future tax savings perspective and will be looking to rebalance our portfolios,aligned on this principle. Do read those interviews when you get a chance and learn from the pro!

My Marketplace

This month one of our sell limit order for Saratoga Investment Corp got triggered and our one and half year old position got sold with almost no profit, no loss factoring in the dividends we received over the time. I don’t even recall why I bought them back then but was a good riddance. We lost $88 worth of annual dividend and that was my only complain.

The proceed along with some other dividend money was utilized to buy 2 shares of Royal Bank, 25 shares of Apple and 40 shares of ZWC increasing our annual dividends by $77. I am sure both Royal bank and Apple requires no explanation at all; ZWC is a covered call ETF from BMO and comprises of all major Canadian stock. Their annual yield is 7.16% which is 0.11 cents per share, per month and they costs 0.72% as MER with 15.95% returns so far in 2021.

Needless to say I also kept accumulating more of CIBC shares as part of my regular RRSP contribution through my payroll clubbed with Employee Share Purchase Plan.

No new action in crypto space this month, just watching the painful downward movements for both Bitcoin & Dogecoin that I hold. As I mentioned in the past, I will officially track crypto investment if the valuation increases more than $10,000 until then it is just having fun (..or pain)!

Rental Earnings

Principal residence – The legal basement construction continued this month and as I mentioned in May updates, last month work accomplished were:

Electric meter movement from back of the house to side
Electrical panel upgrade from 100 to 200 AMP
Separate backyard entrance built (steps, door, railing)
Internal framing
Plumbing rough-ins
HVAC
Foundational electrical work
Wall insulation

In June, the work continued with:

Tiles installation
Hardwood flooring
Drywall installation
Mudding and taping
Painting

As you can see, there is so much work involved and more important is the sequence and staged inspection clearances as this is a legal second dwelling unit. The work is continued and is scheduled to be wrapped up in July. We have already found a potential tenant for this unit and more on this in next monthly update for July.

Investment property 1 – We collected the rents and overall the cash flow is positive but the upstairs tenant reported a temporary job loss due to Covid. It looks like we are going back into turbulence with this property and it just makes me upset and wonder if we should just sell it and deploy the money into stocks! We have locked in so much money into this property that it would easily generate about $2000 per month in dividend! The mortgage renewal application is in the final stage post property appraisal, which came in quite good. We decided to move to a new bank as the conditions were more favourable. More update on what action we took for the defaulting tenant and mortgage renewal next month.

Investment property 2 – Finally we closed the selling of this property and proceed is deposited in our bank account! So this is the last month I am providing an update on this property and will be removed going forward! If you followed our last few monthly updates, you may know how relieved we are after last minute buyer’s mortgage denial back in May (original closing month). This property was co-owned with our real estate agent at 50% partnership. Some facts and figures:

Property: 3BR townhouse with unfinished basement in Brampton, ON
Bought in Jan’20 for $495,000 plus $10,000 buying cost with 20% down payment ($50K each)
Rented out to a great tenant for $2100 per month from Feb’20-Feb’21
Renovated top to bottom including finished basement from Mar’21-May’21 costing about $50,000
Sold in Jun’21 (originally May’21) for $720,000, highest sale price in the complex
Usual expenses included Closing cost, Realtor fee, Bank fine (..ouch!) etc
We both more than doubled our initial investment in 18 months, 230% to be precise

I don’t know about you but to me this certainly is a rosy story if I leave minor hiccups out but nevertheless a great investment story with solid (..and guaranteed) returns and we may do it again with our agent if such opportunity presents. But as I mentioned last month we were just waiting for this sale money to come so we can invest in a business opportunity with my friends. While I will add a section next month onwards, all I can say for now with super excitement is.. we are now officially a partner in an Indian restaurant scheduled to open in Burlington, ON soon! 🤟

Lending Interest Earnings

As usual, we collected $18 in interest from lending loop on our initial investment of $2000. Yyou can also explore this option for relatively smaller capital and if you invest, we both can earn $25 each using my referral link, once you invest $1,500 on their platform. All our private lending principal is now back with us and the money is used to pay-off some of our line of credit balance. 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 feel happy to share that we are already close to achieve our goal just in six 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 me 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.

This is a wrap (..oh boy a long one this time!) 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, Get vaccinated and don’t forget to Save-Invest-Repeat. Please do share with people in need and count your blessings.. Good luck! 😊

May’21 – Monthly Passive Income update!

23-Jun-2123-Jun-21R1 Comment

Hi there!

I will be honest, this month’s update took me longer to write and it wasn’t because of complexity or length, it was simply because I didn’t felt like writing! I tried quite a few times and couldn’t finish due to lack of focus and interest and this was the first time since I started blogging an year ago! By no mean this shows lack of my commitment to our financial goals or towards this site, I believe it is just a “phase” and it happens! Normally I write our monthly updates in one sitting but this one took like four and I don’t intend to keep it this way. Not to blame myself totally and giving some slack, a lot is going on currently. Be it mortgage refinancing/renewal, selling a property, focusing on two new businesses setup (though my involvement in comparatively less), arranging funds, basement renovation, 9-5 work etc. This phase should pass and I would like to go back with my routine of publishing it before 10th of each month.

We got our first Covid vaccine shots and are a bit more relieved, if not pandemically, at least psychologically. The cases are declining and things finally seems returning back to normal or shall in next few months. The biggest relief to me is seeing stores open and people lining up for businesses and this is a heartning and normalancy sign.

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

Starting April, we started seeing positive cash flow from our rental income and it continued this month as well. This month, our passive income comprised of 55% rental, 41% dividends, and 4% from interest. If you are following our monthly updates, I mentioned our ideal passive income will have following income split:

Rental Income – 45% – $3000 per month
Dividends – 40% – $2500 per month
Lending Interest – 15% – $1000 per month

Our 2025 financial goals is based on the foundation of diversified and sustainable passive incomes. Keeping that in mind, we have decided to passively invest in two different businesses with our friends and I will provide some insight once it takes better shape formally. Once we start seeing some cash flow, I will update our diversity pie and 2025 goals if needed.

Monthly Dividend Earnings

Key points from this month’s dividend income are:

We received dividend deposits from total 14 companies (10 Canadian & 4 US), with total value of $181.30, a 20% increase from May’20
For ease and simplification, I assume 1 USD = 1 CAD
Top 3 dividend contributors were Pembina Pipelines, Abbvie and AT&T
We dripped 3 shares in total – 1 each for Diversified Royalty, Pizza Pizza & Plaza REIT
Received one dividend increase of 7% from Apple
Monthly average for 2021 dividends so far is $556.20 Or about $18.50 a day!

Dividend Goal Tracker – Planned vs Actual

Within first 5 months of 2021, we achieved 33% of this year’s goal against targeted 47%. The difference between planned and actual keeps on increasing and this is mostly due to our recent focus on growth and non-dividend paying stocks. This was a deliberate move since we have a relatively long horizon before we wish to retire and live off dividends. Based on this rebalancing, I may have to revisit the goal towards the end of third quarter but I hope not to fall too short in our goals.

My Marketplace

It was unusually busy month with 2 sells and proceed going towards 2 buys and still holding some cash (BTW at the time of writing, the cash got already used up in May.. 😉).

We sold AT&T after the news of them buying Discovery, while I loved their juicy 7% dividend yield, the price has been relatively flat in past 5 years and I lost the patience on this news. Their debt is high and probably to fund this deal, they shall cut their dividend and hence price could further slump. After two and a half years of holding, I sold them with meagre 1% profit or 19% if I factor in the dividends.

Second sale was Chorus aviation and now when I look at it, it was a bad decision to buy in the first place! I hold them under both my RRSP & TFSA accounts and had sold them in November’20 from my RRSP and then was just waiting for a better price before getting rid of them totally. They cut their dividend back in Apr’20 and ever since struggled to appreciate in pricing due to pandemic and lesser flight demands. In both accounts I sold at a loss of more than 30% each but I didn’t had a big position so the loss wasn’t too big.

Our first buy was adding 10 shares of Algonquin Power to our existing position, taking our total count to 127 shares and increasing the forward yield by $6.20 annually. If you are a Canadian dividend investor than AQN should be a familiar name, they are a Canadian renewable energy and regulated utility conglomerate with assets across North America. They actively invests in hydroelectric, wind and solar power facilities, and utility businesses, through its operating subsidiaries.

Our next buy was 76 shares of Palantir Technologies, they do not pays dividend and the buy was more from growth perspective and a long term hold. I was eyeing them since a long time and finally got the opportunity! Palantir is an American software company that specializes in big data analytics, founded in 2003 and headquartered in Denver, Colorado. The company is known for three projects in particular: Palantir Gotham, Palantir Metropolis, and Palantir Foundry. Palantir Gotham is used by counter-terrorism analysts at offices in the United States Intelligence Community and United States Department of Defense. Palantir Metropolis is used by hedge funds, banks, and financial services firms with clients such as Morgan Stanley, Merck, Airbus and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. We are already up 20% but our holding is for a long term and we will add to our position at given opportunity.

As always, we also kept accumulating more of CIBC shares as part of my regular RRSP contribution through my payroll clubbed with Employee Share Purchase Plan.

No new action in crypto space this month, just watching and ups or downs on every small news. I wish I had unlimited funds to buy the dips, unfortunately I don’t! As I mentioned in the past, I will officially track crypto investment only if the valuation increases more than $10,000 until then it is just having fun!

Rental Earnings

Principal residence – As I mentioned in April updates, we were just waiting for legal basement work to start and gladly we chose a very professional contractor! The work started as promised, they day after meter movement work and by end of May we got lot of work accomplished. So far, we got a side entrance built (steps, door, railing) along with internal framing, plumbing, electricals, insulation. Being a legal second dwelling, all of these work is also inspected and approved by city officials. Next step is roof insulation followed by dry wall, mudding, finishing etc. The contractor is one of a kind and it amazes me how he manages multiple projects in parallel. If anyone needs a contractor in GTA area, feel free to ping me for his contact. As stated last month, this basement unit should go for $1,200 a month rent, which is about 20% annual return and at the same time should increase the property valuation by $125,000.

Investment property 1 – Nothing special to report, we kept collecting the rent and overall the cash flow is positive. The mortgage on this property is up for renewal next month and we are in the process of renewing it along with option to refinance. If anything, with low interest rate, we expect to extract more money from the property to pay off some debts and still lower the monthly mortgage payments and hence better cash flow. By the time next month, we should have clarity on whether we will go with existing bank or move on to a new one.

Investment property 2 – If you followed our last update, we sold this property and closing was end of May but the excitement do not cease on this one! The buyer couldn’t secure mortgage and we signed a mutual amendment to extend the closing to end of June now. Honestly, if I did not extended and put the property in the market, I wouldn’t have got the price I locked back in April. I am really hoping now to get over this and move on. I already have plans for the proceeds and this delay is keeping my anxiety level high, unfortunately this is part of the process and at times, it happens sometimes. To remind you all, I co-own this property with my own real estate agent and at a high level we are looking at doubling our initial investment in short span of one and half years. I will delve into details once we formally close the property.

Will repeat from last time, 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

This space will keep getting boring now onwards with nothing to report whatsoever except minuscule Lending loop income. This month it was $18 on our initial investment of $2000, interests re-invested bringing our lifetime earnings to $479.25! You can also invest and we both can earn $25 each using my referral link, once you invest $1,500 on their platform. 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 feel happy to share the news that on this front, we are quite ahead of our plan just within six months, please check our page sharing with society for more details. 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, Get vaccinated and don’t forget to Save-Invest-Repeat. Please do share with people in need and count your blessings.. Good luck! 😊

April’21 – Monthly Passive Income update!

09-May-2109-May-21R5 Comments

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

Unlike March, we finally started seeing positive cash flow on our rental income and needless to say, it is so much of a relief! This month, our passive income comprised of 66% dividends, 33% of rental and 1% of from interest. If you are following our monthly updates, I mentioned our ideal passive income will have following income split:

Rental Income – 45% – $3000 per month
Dividends – 40% – $2500 per month
Lending Interest – 15% – $1000 per month

2025 goals that we put together is based on the foundation of good diversified and sustainability earnings. Keeping that in mind, we have couple of businesses that we are exploring as partnership route and I will update more on this next month. I am also going to update both the goals and diversity pie at some point to factor in earnings from businesses, but it will be a while before we get to it as we get more understanding on the earnings.

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! 😊

March’21 – Monthly Passive Income update!

11-Apr-2111-Apr-21R1 Comment

Hi there!

Early arrival of warmer weather is a silver lining amidst third wave (.. or not sure at what number we are now!) of pandemic and new restriction enforcement. My work from home routine is getting bearable with half of my time working from the deck or backyard, soaking in the sun and listening to the chirping birds! I never imagined infrastructure build for Amber alert will be used to broadcast stay at home emergency order!

The rising cases all over the world (..in some parts even more than first phase) makes us believe the whole situation is really grim, out-of-hand, and slow vaccine rollout is quite hopeless. I feel the administrations all over the world could have done a better job with speedup vaccination drives, it could have helped contain the pandemic to some level but then what do I know.. there could be endless challenges. Anyways I am hearing that in “hot zones” of Ontario, the plan is going to be much more aggressive now and the goal is to reduce the age group by 5 years; and I am really glad they are looking at it this way not but my question remains, what made you go soft to begin with! I really hope the rollout goes quicker as a lot is at stake, more than ever and people are really getting restless and we all really want to witness a stress free summer!

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

We saw no rental income for the third straight month which makes an ugly pie yet again! If you followed our monthly updates, then you will know our ideal passive income will have following income split:

Rental Income – 45% – $3000 per month
Dividends – 40% – $2500 per month
Lending Interest – 15% – $1000 per month

We have couple of good businesses that we are exploring as partnership route and I may have an update on it in coming months, and all the while our pursuit to other passive income sources to build a solid foundation for our 2025 goals with good diversification and sustainability and hopefully over time we will see less fluctuation and more stability.

Monthly Dividend Earnings

The recent surge in market helped our portfolio attain new highs! 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 $484.76
For ease and simplification, I assume 1 USD = 1 CAD
We dripped a share each for Diversified Royalty, Pizza Pizza, Plaza REIT & whopping 3 shares from Enbridge
Received an increased dividend from A&W 35% and CNR 7%
Monthly average for 2021 dividends so far is $538.36 OR about $18 a day!

Dividend Goal Tracker – Planned vs Actual

Planned Yearly: Blue bars | Actual Yearly: Pink bars | Planned Monthly: Green line | Actual Monthly: Green plot

Achieved 19% of this year’s goal which is $1615 out of total $8500 as compared to target of 25%. Realizing shifting priority (allocate more towards growth stocks) and slippage in achieving targets, I may have to revisit the goal towards the end of third quarter.

My Marketplace

I was holding a tiny bit of Saputo for 3 years with no growth at all and I lost my patience with this one and hence was looking for an escape route with dignity! The recent rally produced an opportunity to sell my 30 shares with no-profit/no-loss, dividend included. If I exclude the dividends then I would have been at a loss of about 4.5%. This experience give one more reason to think twice before putting money into anything, but no qualm as the stake was quite low (.. well if you compare it to my Vermilion Energy fiasco!)

The proceed was used to get some more of NIO Inc. I first dipped my toe into this in January and again bought 24 shares to lower the cost basis to $46.6 from $58!

As usual, I kept collecting my CIBC shares as part of my regular RRSP contribution through my payroll clubbed with Employee Share Purchase Plan. If you aren’t using ESPP program from your employer then <<scream begins>> ENROLL NOW AND DON’T LEAVE THE MONEY ON THE TABLE! <<scream ends>>!

Lastly, I dropped $500 again towards Bitcoin bringing the total allocation to $3500 which I am comfortable losing it all which I doubt will happen! So far I think I am at a gain of about 30% in 3 months. I may not go over $5000 on cryptocurrency and although I don’t track it yet as part of my portfolio, I may if the valuation increases significantly (.. insert optimism!).

Rental Earnings

No rent yet again from both of our investment properties and if you follow.. this was the third consecutive month for which we had no earnings! Since I started this month’s update quoting silver lining, I will use it one more time.. we found a good tenant for one of the property starting April. Application screened, first and last rent collected, place cleaned, painted, and minor issues fixed! The rent I got is significantly lesser than my previous tenant but the person is good with stable income and hopefully, both of us have a good time! Three months without income puts us in a bleak position as we bleed money towards mortgage, insurance, utilities and other expenses, but the silver lining is we survived and see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Even for the townhouse, we are in a much better position. The renovation got completed, cleanup done and the property was listed on MLS for sale. We already have an offer that we accepted and I will share more on it next month.

For the third house, we are still waiting for the legal basement work to start as the hydro company is yet to move the electric meter to the side of the house. With increasing lumber cost, I would hope for my contractor to honour the agreed price else I will again have a setback! I am going to reach out to him as soon as the meter movement work is scheduled.

Lending Interest Earnings

We received back the principal from the only outstanding loan and hence it’s a wrap on our lending earnings except Lending loop for which I have under $25 of monthly interest from various commitments. The certified check took 5 business days to clear, talk about efficiency and advancement! I literally checked my banking app twice a day as I was so eager to pay of some of my line of credit balances! Needless to say I immediately did it and now our overall debt is in control. The plan now is to refinance our principal resident and pay off completely and if opportunity presents, may initiate the private lending once again!

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, please do visit when you get a chance. 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. I hope to resume it soon after these rental madness ends.

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! 😊

February’21 – Monthly Passive Income update!

06-Mar-2119-Mar-21RLeave a comment

Hello!

I hope you are staying sane and sticking to whatever plan you laid out for yourself.. be it maintaining your schedule while working from home (..trust me it isn’t easy to work from home anymore though there are benefits) or staying the course with your exercise routine or the plan to save and invest! It is all the more important to maintain the sanity with ongoing pandemic, the lockdowns and restriction with growing level of stress and frustration. It seems like the limit is reaching when we just want to break free and return back to normal life as before, free from fear and stress and masks and sanitizers! Have patience and hopefully after few months, we shall be like before. Coming back to business, as usual, 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

For the second month in a row, we had no rental income but surely mortgages and taxes to pay so the pie looks ugly and scary! By 2025, our ideal pie should have the following income split:

Rental Income – 45% – $3000 per month
Dividends – 40% – $2500 per month
Lending Interest – 15% – $1000 per month

We are actively exploring other passive income sources to build a solid foundation for our 2025 goals with good diversification and sustainability and hopefully over time we will see less fluctuation and more stability.

Monthly Dividend Earnings

Key points from this month’s dividend income are:

We received dividend deposits from total 13 companies (8 Canadian & 5 US), with total value of $191.16
While to keep it simple I assume 1 USD = 1 CAD, I realize this month brought us dividends from both sides almost equal!
I normally compare yearly dividends but couldn’t help myself noticing Feb’21 brought in 30% less than Feb’20 and this was due to bad investments (can’t believe they were recommended by a paid subscription!) such as Chesswood & Vermillion Energy, I sold them and redeployed elsewhere!
We dripped a share each for Pizza Pizza & Plaza REIT
Received an increased dividend from Abbvie 10.2% and reduced dividend from RioCan -33%, I plan to drop RioCan at some point after recouping some of the loss

Dividend Goal Tracker – Planned vs Actual

Two months down and ten more to go and so far we have achieved 13% of our dividend goal for this year. With the annual target of $8500 we roughly need 9% a month, so we are already slipping. I am knowingly redeploying more to low (or no) yielding stocks when opportunity presents, keeping in mind the broader time horizon we have and hence tilting a bit more towards growth stocks but maintaining a healthy balance with dividend payers. While the dividend target is still the same for the year, I would admit that I may revisit the goal if need be, towards the end of third quarter.

My Marketplace

Unfortunately we don’t have net new cash to take benefit of recent dips. I still got a chance to buy 15 shares of Algonquin when it dipped due to Texas snow and blackout, increasing our annual dividend to miniscule $12. AQN needs no introduction and is a well known name in dividend world, they have tremendous growth potential and I have a good faith in them.

We also had some accumulated dividends in one of our account and I dipped my toe into 90 shares of Banxa Holdings Inc (CVE:BNXA). They are a payments service provider (PSP) with mission to build the bridge between fiat and digital currency. This was more of an impulse buy in the heat of the moment when I witnessed cryptocurrencies scaling new highs and Bitcoin adoption by several mainstream companies lead by Tesla & Square.

I again started buying some Bitcoin but I don’t track the gain (or loss) anymore as it is strictly now a dump-and-forget play. I had been severely burnt in the past and don’t want to repeat the same mistake again. I started buying weekly cryptocurrencies (BTS, ETH & LTC) in late of 2019 when BTC was in the range of $5000-$25000 but to much of my dismay sold the entire portfolio last year at about 35% gain when BTC was $23000. I needed the money to help with the renovation for the house we bought. When I think about this transaction now I laugh (..in pain) as the investment would have tripled by now but then hey.. I still made a good profit in a year and half and the money helped us when we needed the most, isn’t that’s what money is for? Back then I used Coinbase for the transactions but at some point the credit card transactions started getting declined for some reason (I suspect banks denying them). So I now use a Canadian company Coinsquare, and it supports Interac and wire transfers (over $10000) as mediums to transfer funds, no complain so far except the interac transfer takes few hours to complete.

Lastly, I kept nibbling at CIBC shares as part of my regular RRSP contribution through my payroll. With great F21 Q1 results and stock hitting 52W highs, this particular account of mine reached a milestone of $50000! I have been contributing since last 6 years through my bi-weekly payroll deductions. If you have heard the saying – drop by drop is the water pot filled, it perfectly fits here!

Rental Earnings

We are going through some really tough times with the rental properties as both properties are vacant and we are bleeding money. While rents are not coming, we still have to pay the mortgages, property taxes and several utility bills! Rental income may look enticing but vacancy periods are real dampeners and unless you have deep pockets, it could put you into a lot of stress. Thankfully for us, we have things in control so far, thanks to good line of credit limits! The townhouse is undergoing renovation before we will put it in market for sale and as per my real estate agent, he aims to make this the highest seller on the street! Talk about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel! We purchased this house 14 months ago and it was rented for 12 months so we haven’t bleed a lot of money in this one. At the end of the deal, each of us expect to net about $75000 on our initial investment of $50000 after capital gain and expenses.

For the second property, we are actively looking for tenant and I must tell you, the rental market isn’t good at this moment. Last year it took us just 1 week to rent it out but this time around, we are in second month without finding a good tenant and not to mention the much reduced rent!

The third house we have for which legal basement permit came in and I finalized a contractor, the work hasn’t started yet! The area where we planned to make the basement entrance has hydro cables going in and hence the electrical meter (and probably the panel) would require relocation. While cost is fine, this will delay the start of the work by minimum 2-3 weeks. If it goes smooth, it isn’t construction or renovation!

Lending Interest Earnings

Wife had a 0% balance transfer offer on her credit card for 10 months so we transferred some of the line of credit balance on the card last month but still we are paying good amount in interests on borrowed money from line of credit accounts. They do charge a one time 1% transaction fee but still it was helpful though on the flip side it decreased my wife’s credit score drastically! If you ever do it, do make sure you leave about 20% on the card and not utilize the full limit, like we did. Now I am trying to get back within the limit so that her score can start climbing back, we have a mortgage renewal coming up and a good score helps.

The principal from our private lending hasn’t come yet, the borrower asked for an extension of a month and we expect to get the money some time this month. Eagerly waiting for this money so it can cover the basement construction cost and reduce some line of credit balances.

Lending Loop kept paying its monthly interest and while I don’t closely monitor the statements, I haven’t been informed of any defaults so far except couple of delays, which is totally understood considering the prolonged lockdown and adverse impact on small businesses. I wish for a speedy recovery for these guys!

Continuing our new year’s resolution of sharing our good fortune (well it isn’t so good right not but nevertheless..) in a measured approach where we aim to giveaway 10% of our previous year’s passive income towards good cause. 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. Sharing with Society & Gratitude & Goodness are dedicated towards these new goals of life, please do visit them when you get a chance.

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! 😊

2020 at a glance!

01-Mar-2101-Mar-21RLeave a comment

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! 😊