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.
Dividend Goal Tracker – Planned vs Actual
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! 😊
