Hi there!
October is the third special month of any year in our household as my birthday falls in this month. Most important month is June in which we have our anniversary and both kids birthdays followed by April when my better half was born. With one year older (.. or shall I say wiser?), we are a bit more closer to financial independence and I feel awesome to say I am more confident and little less worrying when it comes money. If I reflect back past one year, we achieved a lot – we moved in a new house, turned it into a home, both myself and wife got fully vaccinated and evaded Covid so far, built two more sources of income (a legal basement and a stake in a restaurant), enhanced our dividend portfolio which attained new highs, beat the crap out of our sharing with society goal, flipped an investment property for a good profit, invested in a pre-construction condo. So overall it was quite a great year and looking forward to the next one where we already have so much planned for even a better financial stability – such as partnering in a grocery store, hopefully buying another property, assignment sell an under construction condo where we have a stake, putting our investment property back on track for cash-flow, good growth at my 9-5 etc. I tell you being in control of your finances really helps a lot with your confidence and outlook towards life. Just 2 years back if our tenant had stopped paying their rent for 6 months, I would have gotten into some sort of depression but we were able to manage well now and this was because I knew we had funds to fall back on. At present we have 7 figures debt but it is all managed well and is contributing towards our financial independence goals.
The birth day in itself was a business-as-usual affair, it was a work day, cut the cake at midnight, got precious gifts from kids – they made me cards and gifted some of their daily use stuffs. The more you age, the more you realize that expensive gifts doesn’t mean much but things made by kids with lousy wrapping around it are priceless! More than anything else I look forward to Birthdays, Christmas, Valentine’s etc more so now for these tiny presents than anything else, it gives immense joy knowing your kids think about you and care for you on these occasions.
Last month I mentioned we have only contributed about 35% towards our TFSA limit and it made we realize that there is so much yet to achieve. While I was looking for ways to find money to contribute and wollah..! I suddenly came to know that I got a 10% out of turn raise effective immediately in my 9-5 job! Can you believe it? It perfectly fits the saying: where-there-is-a-will-there-is-a-way! I wasted no time calculating what my extra net income would be, Immediately consulted twitter friends on where to open an account, Zeroed on WealthSimple and Opened a new TFSA account with them. I already had two separate TFSA accounts with CIBC Investor’s Edge, one for myself and other earmarked for kids. But I wanted to open a commission-free account since I was going to set up an automated $250 bi-weekly contribution and buy stocks immediately, hence a zero-commission was the most important factor. The two main options were Questrade and WealthSimple and the latter fitted my needs better. They provide free buy/sell of stocks & ETFs and supports fractional buys, which I wanted. On the other hand WealthSimple do not supports DRIP and are expensive for buying US based stocks but I was fine with these limitations. One day I will write a detailed comparison and my reasoning but for now if you want to get started with WealthSimple, you can use my referral code RY_KRA or simply click my referral link, using which you will get cash equivalent of 2 stocks up to $4500 and I will get cash equivalent of 1 stock. Isn’t this nice to get you started and worth trying your luck? With them you can invest $1, $10, $100 or $1000 at your own chosen frequency and pay no commission! A friend referred me and I received about $30 which I used to buy fractional shares of Shopify, which I could never had anywhere else.
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
This month, our passive income split comprised of 98% of Dividends and 2% in Interests from Lending loop & Celsius. We did not had any positive rental income this month. As you may know, our side hustle income so far include 3 different sources as mentioned below along with our aspirational split by 2025. The reality is far from the plan but we will work on it.
- 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 long term passive incomes. We have dipped our toe recently in a restaurant business and once we are clear on the cash-flow, I will add it to the diversity pie and adjust our goals accordingly. Now since a lot of cash went into the restaurant, we will have to decrease the earnings from other sources as we couldn’t invest money in them to increase our income.
Monthly Dividend Earnings
If you have read our July’21 update, you will know that we are destined to hit all time highs in monthly dividends in the months where CIBC pays dividend which are Jan-Apr-Jul-Oct, unless we make a big change to our CIBC holding. Back in July we hit $1000 milestone and here we are again crossing $1000 in dividends and hitting another all time high. I can tell you one thing here.. I am in love with these months! Key points from this month’s dividend income are:
- We received dividend deposits from total 19 entities (18 Canadian & 1 US), with total value of $1020.98, a 23% increase from Oct’20
- For ease and simplicity, I consider USD at par with CAD
- Top 3 dividend contributors were CIBC, Telus and GoEasy
- We dripped 11.5 shares in total – 4.5 for CIBC & one each for Alaris REIT, Algonquin, Diversified Royalty, Pizza Pizza, Plaza REIT, Telus and Transcontinental
- We received 2 dividend raises this month – Alaris Royalty 6.45% & Philip Morris 4.20%
- Average monthly dividends for 2021 so far is $602.20 Or about $20.07 a day. By 2025, we aim to reach about $80 a day.
Dividend Goal Tracker – Planned vs Actual
After ten months of 2021, we could only achieved 71% of this year’s dividend goal against targeted 83%. With just two more months left in 2021, I am sure that we will miss 2021 annual dividend target. I have mentioned in many of my earlier monthly updates, that we started focusing more on growth stocks which pay little to no dividends and secondly we diverted a lot of cash proceeds from our investment property sale towards two business interests. And due to these reasons, we were unable to allocate much funds towards dividend paying stocks. For now we will keep the same goals I put together last year for 2025 and once we have more clarity on business earnings and future capability to invest, I shall update our 2025 goals to reflect more realistic goals and additional source of incomes.
My Marketplace
With accumulated dividends in one of our TFSA account, we bought additional nine shares of Suncor which will contribute additional $15.12 towards our projected annual dividend income. With recent oil price surge the outlook for all Oil & Gas stocks including Suncor have improved. They announced a 100% dividend raise payable in Dec’21 and if you own or track Suncor, you will know they decreased their dividend post pandemic but with this raise, they have reached back to pre-pandemic dividends. We also kept accumulating fractional CIBC stocks with each payroll and added 4.5 shares this month which again will add $$26.16 to annual dividend.
As mentioned above, we also dripped total 11.50 shares from various companies and they in total will increase our PADI by another $31.58 so this month’s contribution towards annual dividend is $82.17 and with these small-small raises, we crossed $7,000 in annual dividends, yet another milestone!
On Crypto front, Bitcoin reached an all time high last month and I pumped in another $500 towards buying few Satoshis. As of this writing, our total Crypto holdings under two separate wallets (CoinSquare & Celsius) is about $7500, a slow and steady rise and still less than 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 Celcius network referral and we both can earn $50 in Bitcoins once you transfer $400 or more. I am also exploring many other wallets and will share details later on.
Last week I attended a Twitter space on basics of Crypto mining which I always wanted to gain an insight on. To my pleasant surprise this session turned out to be super informative and covered the fundamentals. This space was conducted by bunch of Twitter handles @StephenWealthy_ and @OhHaiAndy while supported by @TheMon3yMom and @AdultingIsEasy) and a write-up/recording is available here if you want to read or listen. Crypto mining requires powerful computer such as a Gaming PC or an elaborate mining rig can be built with a combination of strong Graphic cards, extensive memory and other peripherals. They aren’t cheap these days and if you google graphic cards, you will see most of them are out-of-stock everywhere and mostly sold in secondary market at premium. I neither have a gaming PC nor the appetite to spend premium money on GPUs but I will wait for the cards market to cool down a bit before I buy anything, for the time being I was just curious and hence created an account with Cudo miner and got started. Feel free to use my CudoMiner referral link and give it a try yourself, who knows you might get interested and mining become one of your source of income!
Rental Earnings
Principal residence – Nothing new or exciting here, we collected $1200 in rent from the legal basement tenant which helped us pay back a bit of the accumulated debt and related interest. The basement construction costed us about $60,000 which was drawn from one of our line of credit. This amount included the design, permit, construction, electrical panel upgrade and waterline change. Next year we are planning to broaden the driveway and build an external path to the basement entrance which will again cost about $15,000. The rent will help offset some of the debt and while we are not having a positive cash flow yet, I count the rent towards the total rent collection as it is still an earning.
Investment property 1 – As some of you may be aware, our upstairs tenant is not paying the rent or their utilities as per the lease agreement since Jul’21 and this have so far amounted to $13,500. We filed an eviction application with LTB (Landlord-Tenant Board, Ontario) and hearing was back on 10-Nov and to my horror, they ran out of time that day and will give another date in next 3 months. This was our first time dealing with them and the whole experience was nothing short of appalling; after waiting on the zoom meeting for nearly 5 hours, the honourable judge said they ran out of time and will reschedule. The tenant wasn’t even present to contest but they chose to defer another 3 months. I have heard about this board been tenant-friendly but got the first hand experience and must say, I haven’t heard it incorrectly! Anyways, will wait for the next hearing and in the meantime keep sucking up the mortgage, property tax & utilities payments.
On the brighter side, our basement tenant left to live at a B&B and to move out immediately she asked me for a “little help” which I agreed to considering she was paying comparatively lower rent and I could get an opportunity to increase the rent for the incoming tenant a bit. Fortunately we were able to find a new tenant in no time and they settled in, all I hope now is they stay for a longer duration, pay rent on time and we both spent unexciting time. We have had enough drama this year with this rental and would like a break.
Lending Interest Earnings
We collected about $14 in interest from lending loop on our initial investment of $2000. 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 $11 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! 😊
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