November’21 – Side Hustle Income Update!

Happy Holidays!

Hope you are enjoying the winter with your fair share of hot chocolate or mulled wine! I can’t believe we already saw 3-4 times snows before Christmas! November have been extremely busy but exciting on my 9-5 work front as it was time for annual performance reviews, pay hike and bonus allocation. I have handful of employees working with me and with all honesty and dedication I can proudly say that I the best I could for each and every one of them. This is one of my favourite part of the job as it involves constructive feedback towards team member’s growth, and rewarding them for their contribution and hard work throughout the year. On side-hustle front as well it was quite a busy time as I was spending time at the restaurant and assisting other partners on prep work for the grocery store which we aim to start early in 2022! Oh my God I never thought how much groundwork is involved just in planning and establishing a business till opening day, forget about day-to-day grind thereafter! Much respect to all small-business owner and operators especially in this difficult and uncertain times when Covid protocol and restrictions are adding towards their complication and hardship.

Needless to say I could spend less and less time for our monthly updates and November update is coming almost towards the end of December! So without much ado I am getting back to our monthly updates, as usual I start 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

Monthly Dividend Earnings

In October’21 we hit our all time high with monthly dividends and I wish we keep breaking new highs but unfortunately not all months are alike. Maybe eventually our monthly earnings will smoothen out with some adjustments but for now, our focus is only to grow the annual dividend. Key points from this month’s dividend income are:

• We received dividend deposits from total 15 entities (12 Canadian & 3 US), with total value of $173.50, a 19% decrease from Nov’20
• For ease and simplicity, I consider USD at par with CAD
• Top 3 dividend contributors were Pembina Pipelines, Abbvie and Pizza Pizza
• We dripped 3 shares in total – One each for Diversified Royalty, Pizza Pizza & Plaza REIT
• We received 2 dividend raises this month – A&W 3.33% & Whitecap Resources 38.04%
• Average monthly dividends for 2021 so far is $563.27 Or about $18.77 a day. By 2025, we aim to reach $2500 monthly (or about $80 daily).

Dividend Goal Tracker – Planned vs Actual

After eleven months of 2021, we could only achieved 73% of this year’s dividend goal against targeted 92%. With just a month left, we are not going to reach our 2021 annual dividend target. As I mentioned in many of our earlier monthly updates, we started accumulating few growth stocks which pays little to no dividend and also we invested a lot of cash in business interests with our friends. This resulted in less funding availability for dividend stocks and hence we are going to miss on our goal this year. After some thinking I have decided to leave our yearly goals as-is for now as we still have four years to hit our 2025 goals. We may have missed this year’s goal but will try harder for next four years to bridge the gap and meet 2025 targets.

My Marketplace

Back in August I did some fact finding and found out that between myself and wife, we have total TFSA eligible limit of $111K and so far we contributed a paltry sum of about $39K (only ~35% utilization), meaning we still have a massive contribution limit of $72K left. Up until now we focused only on RRSP contribution and now I would like to divert our attention to narrowing down the TFSA gap with aggressive contribution. To help with this I put together a bi-weekly $250 contribution plan towards each of our accounts to invest right away and hence I opened our WealthSimple accounts. We chose them over Questrade primarily because – They allows commission free trade (buy or sell) for both Stocks & ETFs, No minimum balance or trade limit, Supports fractional buys for many selected stocks. These points were all I was looking for though WealthSimple do have limitations such as – They don’t support DRIPs, Auto-deposit takes 3 business days to clear but up to $1500 instant deposit can be made, Don’t support holding USD and charges 1.5% conversion fee every time you buy or sell a US stock. Feel free to sign-up using our WealthSimple referral link to get 2 stocks (valued up to $4500!). Last I heard they are coming up with $10 a month account which will support USD and also increase the instant deposit limit along with other features. Though I don’t need any of those, they would certainly help lot of customers. Opening accounts with them was a breeze as well as start-to-finish is supported on their mobile app itself and didn’t took more than few minutes! As per our bi-weekly plan, the $250 in my account will go towards buying as many Equitable bank it can buy while any leftover balance will go towards buying fractional shares of Royal Bank. In wife’s account, the bi-weekly $250 will buy as many Metro Inc it can buy and any change will go towards buying fractional shares of Brookfield Infrastructure. All four stocks we picked are solid growth stocks with proven track record and rich history of dividend raises, we will see how it goes before making any adjustments. With this plan and some ad-hoc contributions, we aim to exhaust our TFSA limit by 2025.

With accumulated dividend in our RRSP US account we bought 4 Exxon Mobil and under one of our TFSA account, we bought 23 Lightspeed Inc on their recent dip (unfortunately it is still sliding down!). While Exxon Mobil will add $14 towards our annual dividend income, Lightspeed do not pay any dividend. We also kept accumulating fractional CIBC stocks with each payroll and added 3.2 shares this month which again will add $18.50 to annual dividend. With all DRIPs & two dividend raises (mentioned above), they will contribute another $28.50 to our annual dividend. With newly put TFSA bi-weekly plan, we bought 9 shares of Equitable bank, 4 shares of Metro Inc, 0.33 share of Royal bank & 0.07 shares of Brookfield Infra and their combined contribution towards our annual dividend is about $12. The beauty of dividend investing is all these seemingly small Buys, DRIPs, Dividend raises contribute towards projected annual dividend income (PADI) and this month we increased our PADI by $73.30, which brings our annual dividend income to $7,176!

On Crypto front, there is no new money allocation this month and continue to hold a bit of both Bitcoin and Dogecoin under two separate wallets (CoinSquare & Celsius) with combined valuation a little over $7000. But as I have mentioned, I don’t intent to sell them and is in for a long haul, will continue to add up to 5% of our total investments. While CoinSquare is just a crypto trading platform where your holdings do not earn any interest, Celsius is an exciting wallet which also pays you weekly interests on your crypto holdings. Feel free to sign-up using my Celsius network referral and we both can earn $50 in Bitcoins once you transfer $400 or more.

As I mentioned in our last month’s update, I tried my hands at crypto mining and hopefully one day I will be able to spare some money towards building a mining rig to efficiently mine and earn. A good write-up/recording is available here if you want to read or listen. If this interests you, feel free to use my CudoMiner referral link and give it a try yourself, who knows you might get hooked up and take mining seriously and it could become one of your stable source of income!

Rental Earnings

Principal residence – Nothing exciting to mention here, we collected $1200 in rent from our basement apartment tenant which went straightaway towards paying off debt (mostly interest and a bit of principal) we accumulated to build the basement. We also plan to broaden the driveway and add a basement pathway sometime next year, which will again will cost significantly. Needless to say the rent we are collecting will go towards debt repayment for next several years and hence we are not going to have any positive income from this property. While this may look like a loss overall, the property valuation increased significantly and when we sell the house, it will give us a good returns. The rent is still counted as an earning even when it offsets the expenses.

The Canadian Real estate market is still returning double digit growth annually since past few years and I personally feel there is no end to this spectacular growth run in sight. We bought this property last September for $690K and spent about $125K on renovation and building legal basement. Similar properties in our neighbourhood is getting snapped in days in the range of $1.2M and this case study shows if properly executed, how profitable it could be. I understand this is just a paper exercise and no profit is realized until sold but I have an option to refinance the property and get about $350K which can be used to buy another property, build a stock portfolio, invest in business etc. There are opportunities out there available to grab.

Investment property 1 – Our past readers will know that upstairs tenant defaulted on rents since Jul’21 and we had filed a case with Landlord-Tenant Board and we had our hearing in Nov’21. To our horror the judge couldn’t hear our case due to too many grievances and promised to allocate a new date, which could again take another 2-3 months! Fortunately 1 week post the hearing the tenant vacated abruptly and informed me few days later by sending a message on Facebook! While I was quite upset with their irresponsible behaviour, I couldn’t have expected any better from them and I am relieved that they at least left and we all can move on. With all pending rents, utilities and court filing fee, they owe us little over $11K. I am now waiting for the next court date and once I have written court order on the dues, I do plan to file for recovery with a collection agency. I don’t expect to recover any money but I do hope to make them understand that such irresponsible actions can affect credit and hit them hard and they shouldn’t be repeating them with other people. While we all could face difficult financial situation in life, we fight to get back on track and keep good intention to clear our dues. We all have certain responsibilities and do our best to keep it without trying to milk the situation and take unfair advantage.

Apart from not paying the rent and utilities for six months, they also ruined the property by smoking indoors. I hired a painter to scrub all the walls and re-paint the entire house and now it seems breathable! I posted an ad to put it back on rent, hopefully we find a suitable tenant soon and we get back to positive cash-flow. But trust me, this time around I am in no hurry and will screen tenants more strictly than ever even if I have to wait few months. Our new basement tenant who joined us last month settled down and thanks to their portion of rent I am able to stay afloat with the expenses.

Lending Interest Earnings

As usual we earned about $16.50 in interest from various lending loop commitments (loan) on our initial investment of $2000. Our annual return is close to 13.5% which isn’t bad for little diversification. You can also explore this option with a smaller capital and if you invest, we both can earn $25 each using our lending loop referral ink, once you invest $1,500 on their platform.

We also earned about $8 in interests for keeping our Bitcoin on Celsius network. Celsius can not only be used to trade crypto but also to earn interest on the holding. I wasn’t aware of this platform and recently opened an account, transferred a bit of our Bitcoin from another wallet and started earning weekly interests. It is good to have another source of earning, no matter how small it is in the beginning. You can sign-up using our Celsius network referral link when signing up and can earn $50 in BTC with your first transfer of $400 or more.

Lastly, our sharing with society initiative continued and although we achieved our 2021 target last month itself, we continued sharing our good fortune with society. If you are not aware, we took a resolution to giveaway 10% of our previous year’s passive income towards a good cause. 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!

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 or two in a month, whenever I post on this website.

Stay safe, Take it easy and Save-Invest-Repeat! 😊