Tag: #FI

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

Monthly Dividend Earnings

After attaining an all time monthly dividend highs in July’21, August floored us with our lowest dividend month for this year (.. in fact lowest in last 15 months!). This was due to closing our positions in AT&T & Saratoga in past months. While it is disheartening to see a slump, it is a reminder that we need to work even harder and grow our portfolio – point noted and now we need to find that extra money to invest!

Key points from this month’s dividend income are:

• We received dividend deposits from total 15 entities (11 Canadian, 3 US & 1 ETF), with total value of $169.07, a 7% decrease from Aug’20
• For ease and simplicity, I consider 1 USD = 1 CAD
• Top 3 dividend contributors were Pembina, Abbvie and Pizza Pizza
• We dripped 3 shares in total – one each for Diversified Royalty, Pizza Pizza and Plaza REIT
• We received one dividend raise from A&W – 11.11%
• Average monthly dividends for 2021 so far is $560.25 Or about $18.675 a day. By 2025, we wish to reach about $80 a day, long long way to go!

Dividend Goal Tracker – Planned vs Actual

In eight months of 2021, we achieved 53% of this year’s dividend goal against targeted 66%. With just four months to go, we are lagging behind quite significantly with our 2021 dividend goal and may not be able to achieve it. This is mainly due to our refocus on growth stocks and two business interests where we are diverting a lot of funds, which was otherwise earmarked for dividend portfolio. I will revisit the 2025 dividend goals some time later this year (.. or early next year) to revise the dividend goals and again next year to include business earnings as part of our overall passive income.

My Marketplace

There was no Buy or Sell in August and this buying and holding forever (.. well unless something goes terribly wrong!) bodes well with our investment philosophy. We are currently in accumulation phase and all we want is to keep buying quality stocks and build a significant portfolio to live off, years away from now.

This doesn’t mean we had no excitement at all! As I mentioned earlier we did DRIP 3 shares and also accumulated 9 more shares of CIBC as part of employee share purchase plan under monthly RRSP contribution via payroll deductions. These new acquisitions will contribute about $54 more towards our forward annual dividend yield. I know this is quite small and insignificant amount but as the saying goes and I strongly believe in – Individually we are one drop, together we are an ocean!

This month, we did not put any new money in Crypto either. If you have followed us, you may know we hold little bit of Bitcoin between two wallets – CoinSquare & Celsius (which also pays weekly interests on your holdings, isn’t that nice?!). Feel free to sign-up using my Celcius network referral and we both can earn $50 in Bitcoins once you transfer $400 or more. I also had a fun-trade couple of months ago with Dogecoin and whatever left in our CoinSquare account is free money, will let it ride or perish! Within last one month, Bitcoin increased about 30% and my other holding Dogecoin raised more than 50% but our overall valuation haven’t reached $10K that I formally start tracking cryptocurrencies under our portfolio.

Right now we are financially recuperating from the debt we put on ourselves for basement renovation and shall take few months before we are in a “healthy” state. Once we are there, I want to work on at least two areas on priority – 1. Create a plan to reduce the big gap we currently have for our TFSA contribution 2. Create a regular crypto investment plan

Rental Earnings

Principal residence – While minor touch-ups are still pending here and there, the basement is now registered legally and rented out. I am so glad that after spending 6 figures in renovation and almost one year of hardship, this property is ready for some cash flow. The one bedroom unit is rented for $1200 monthly which is a bit on low for such units but we chose to rent out to a couple as they are out working most of the week and don’t own a car. This means, we save on utilities, have minimum interference, and don’t have to broaden the driveway yet. It was a win-win situation and so far we are glad we rented them the basement.

Investment property 1 – This upstairs tenant defaulted on the rent starting July and Landlord-Tenant board of Ontario gave us 10-Nov date for the eviction hearing. By then it would be 5 months of rent non-payment and the whole experience screams overhauling of the process to help both parties. I hope one day, the concerned board wakes up and improve on the timeframe it takes and the process in general to avoid sheer waste of time and inefficiencies! For now, we are impatiently waiting for the hearing and bleeding money. 🥲

The proceed from investment property mortgage refinancing and investment 2 property sale are used to fund part ownership in two businesses and I will write more on them once we are in a better shape. For now, all I can say is a lot goes into planning and execution for such projects with significant risk and reward at play. More on this to come in coming months.. Stay tuned.

Lending Interest Earnings

We collected about $15 in interest from lending loop on our initial investment of $2000. You can also explore this option for relatively smaller capital and if you invest, we both can earn $25 each using my lending loop referral ink, once you invest $1,500 on their platform.

We also earned about $3.5 in interests for keeping our Bitcoin on Celsius network. This was recommended by a twitter friend and after initial setup and Bitcoin transfer (partial transfer only for now) from CoinSquare, I started seeing weekly interests been deposited to my account. It is great to earn interests while the cryptocurrency is just sitting somewhere! You can signup using my Celsius network referral link when signing up and can earn $50 in BTC with your first transfer of $400 or more.

We continued our new year’s resolution of sharing our good fortune in a measured approach, wherein we aim to giveaway 10% of our previous year’s passive income towards a good cause. We have almost achieved our 2021 goals (~96%) in eight months! Please check our page sharing with society for more details and do share if you can with any of the charities or initiative we donated, it will mean a lot to us and keep in mind, even a small amount helps! I personally also decided to express more gratitude and appreciation towards the little things in life that I feel blessed with and enjoy, but is mostly taken for granted. While I normally document it at this link – gratitude & goodness, I haven’t gotten a chance to update it lately but I hope to resume it soon.

That’s it for now readers and see you next month! Please do subscribe using the widget at the bottom of the page to get monthly updates, I don’t spam and you will only get an email whenever I post on this website.

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

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

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

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

June

8. Tiles installation
9. Hardwood flooring
10. Drywall installation
11. Mudding and taping
12. Painting

July

13. Door installation and painting
14. Trimming
15. Kitchen cabinets fixture
16. Plumbing work – Taps, Sinks, Shower, Vanity etc installation
17. Electrical work – Switches, Plugs, Potlights, Lights, Alarms etc
18. 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.

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! 😊