Tag: Financial Independence

Hello again!

Hope this winter haven’t tested your nerves yet, few more weeks of cold hopefully! When the weather crossed 10 degrees back in early Feb we thought it is over and then came 20 inches of backbreaking snow to dash the hope. When we first came to Canada back in 2013, the winter wasn’t so bothering but slowly over years we “charm” is fading and probably our tolerance level is decreasing as we are getting older. Hence it is highly likely that once we achieve financial independence and work gets optional, we may spend majority of the winter months in India or at least somewhere warmer and “snowless”. To make the dark winter months bearable, we have worked on an decent arrangement with bunch of friends – to meet and have a potluck (..or order food) on alternate weekends at one of our place. Gladly we live in a neighborhood where we have 3 friends within 200 meters and meeting often lets our kids play together indoors while grown-ups can chit-chat & laugh over food and drinks. Winters makes us immigrants realize how fortunate we are to have a social network of friends in a country where we don’t have any immediate family to go to or look for any help.

Delving straight into the business, please find below our February updates which as usual starts by updating below two pages with the latest data:

• 2025 Goal tracker on homepage – With everything going on in our lives financially, after careful consideration we revised our 2025 passive income goal (more on this in next section).
• Dividend Portfolio with latest holdings

Passive Income Pie

This month, our passive income split comprised 22% of Dividends, 77% in Rental income & miniscule 1% interest earnings from Lending loop. Our 2025 goal is to have income from below sources with target percentage split as mentioned:

• Dividend Income: 50.00% ($1500 per month)
• Rental Income: 32.50% ($975 per month)
• Lending Interest: 0.83% ($25 per month)
• Restaurant Earning: 16.66% ($500 per month)

Over time we will work to smoothen the monthly fluctuations so to have steady monthly side income from these hustles. As I also mentioned last month we haven’t seen any income from our restaurant adventure yet and the first earning distribution is aimed for Oct’23, after completing our 2nd year and thereafter we will have annual profit sharing. For now I have added a token amount of $500 monthly and will be updated to a more realistic number post first earnings. In all likeliness we will re-strategize our financial freedom goal post more clarity.

Monthly Dividend Earnings

While Jan’23 attained all time high dividend earnings, Feb did not meet the same fate, which was expected. We always had a weak spread of dividend payers in Feb-May-Aug-Nov months, something to work on but not a priority. We also saw this decline in YoY as Pembina Pipelines switched their dividend schedule from monthly to quarterly and their next payment will be in Mar’23. Key highlights from this month’s dividend income are:

• We received dividend deposits from a 11 different entities (7 Canadian & 4 US), with total value of $182.29, a 15% YoY decline from Feb’22
• For ease and simplicity, we consider 1 CAD = 1 USD
• Top 3 dividend contributors were RBC, Abbvie and Pizza Pizza
• We dripped 3 shares in total – one each from Pizza Pizza, Plaza REIT & Whitecap Resources
• We received 3 dividend raises this month: Abbvie: 4.96%, Royal Bank: 3.13% & Whitecap Resources: 31.61%
• Average monthly dividends for 2023 so far is $771.86 or about $26 a day. By 2025, we aim to reach $1500 monthly (or $50 daily)

Dividend Goal Tracker – Planned vs Actual

Our revised aspirational dividend earnings for year 2023 is $12000 and two months into the year, we achieved 13% of our goal. Due to other financial commitments, the money is quite tight right now for investing and the skyrocketing rate of interest isn’t making sense anymore to invest from available line of credit. Up until early 2022 we used to dip into “cheap” credit for investments but not anymore as nothing is cheaper than 6.5%. Hence investment strategy for this year is a lot complicated – We aim to save as much money as possible from our day jobs, divert a major portion towards paying off high interest debts & with a much smaller portion, invest under our TFSA accounts to narrow down the contribution limit gap we have. Most of our buys under TFSA are focused on buying companies with low yield but with a track record of double digits dividend growth. While many don’t like significant debt, we are not that uncomfortable with it and hence would like to focus on both debt repayment & investing as much as possible. Readers may know we carry a significant debt right now which was taken to fund couple of businesses. This situation forced us to reduce our 2025 dividend goals from $30000 to $18000.

My Marketplace

While Jan’23 was a busy month for transactions, Feb is much quieter as we did not buy any share other than CIBC which we accumulate by having bi-weekly payroll deduction and goes straight into my RRSP account. Other than this already set routine, we just dripped 3 additional shares and had 3 companies raising their dividend, resulting in Projected Annual Dividend Income (PADI) for the month increased by $82.96, not a huge amount but over time and with discipline & determination, we should see much bigger increases in next few years.

There was no dividend paid either from any of the stocks we own under WealthSimple TFSA accounts which we immediately use up to buy fractional shares. WealthSimple is a commission free stock trading platform and they support fractional buys for any amount and hence putting our money immediately to work for us. If you don’t have WS Account and would like to try them out, you can use my WealthSimple referral link to earn $5-$3000 to invest in stocks!

On Crypto front, we did nothing at all in entire 2022 and don’t think I have any funds or appetite to deploy any more than what we currently have. Last year was pretty rough year for cryptocurrencies both in terms of price depreciation & many providers declaring bankruptcy. Unfortunately Celsius network was one such platform on which we had all our Bitcoin & Ethereum holdings and since August of 2022 they have stopped paying interests on holding cryptos & even withdrawals from their platform is halted. So money is stuck there, let’s see when we could recover our holdings. Once we are able to recover our money, we will redeploy on CoinSquare platform which apparently hold the fort pretty well when others kept collapsing! Also, once our financial situation improves we will resume investing in cryptocurrencies.

Rental Earnings

I provided detailed insight on our properties in Jan’23 updates and hence going forward I am going to keep it simple as there doesn’t changes much month-over-month. I will report net cashflow from each of the properties, which is calculated by subtracting rent collected by all expenses including but not limited to mortgage, property tax, insurance, utilities and repairs (if any). These numbers don’t exactly translate on tax filing as I don’t take into consideration the interests we paid to the bank for mortgage or on any other loan we took to renovate the property. I do the final calculation at the time of tax season and don’t intent to share it here. So here are the details for this month:

Principal residence – We rent out a portion of our basement which is legally built as a second dwelling unit. The net cashflow from our principal residence for this month is -$831.15 which is lower than normal as we have to pay property taxes in Feb-Mar-Apr-Jul-Aug-Sept months, which eats up the cashflow. I know the picture doesn’t look rosy but imagine bearing all the cost by ourselves with $0 external support!

Investment property 1 – Net cashflow from this property for this month is $1504.47 and this property acts as a backbone to many of my financial needs and decisioning. And this is the same house where we incurred significant loss due to a tenant not paying the rent and we had to evict by going to LTB. If you take into account all the money we lost leaving aside the pain, anxiety, depression; we are way behind the recovery but I am happy with a good positive cashflow, for now. Once the market improves I plan to test the waters by putting this house for sale and see what is being offered. Depending on it we may sell it and consolidate some of the debt we carry, I will keep you’ll posted!

Investment property 2 – The net cashflow from this property is -$28.53 due to property tax payments. If you followed us in Jan’23, you will know that this house was purchased in equal partnership with a friend of mine. If not, do read our last month’s updates to know how we renovated this house by building a second legal unit and turned it into a positive cashflow entity. It wouldn’t have been possible without 6 months of hard work and more importantly courage in the time when market “tumbled” and a we saw many houses booking losses. We expect much better numbers coming out of this property in non-tax months. Out near term (2-4 years) intention with this house is to sell and book profit for which we will wait for market to improve, no rush.

Lending Interest Earnings

We earned $12.90 in total interests this month from several lending loop commitments (loans) worth combined total of $2000 dumped back in 2019. It fluctuates a bit on monthly basis but no complains for now. At present both principal and interest amounts are insignificant but if I have spare cash, I would surely lend more on this platform. 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.

That’s it for now readers for this month and I hope our journey irrespective of the baby steps, help you in some way. Please do subscribe using the widget at the bottom of the page to get our once a month update, I don’t spam and you will only get an email or two in a month, whenever I post on this website.

Stay safe, stay cool, and most importantly Save-Invest-Repeat! 😊

Hello dear readers!

Happy New Year! I hope 2023 is treating you awesome so far & your life is getting whatever you longed for. Our long term follower/subscriber may know that I took a break from updating this website for entire 2022 to focus on few more priority initiatives. I am planning to write few articles on key 2022 updates including how restaurant business is doing, how new Indian grocery business is posing new challenges everyday and how life changed after sudden demise of one of our dear business partner, who brought us all together. Overall 2022 was one of the most difficult year of our lives and honestly I am relieved it is over. I will also go back and update about our 2022 passive incomes, if not detailed I wish to at least upload the graphics.

We went aggressive catching up with our pending TFSA limits by contributing little over $25K in a year, via bi-weekly contributions under both my own and wife’s accounts with Wealthsimple. I can’t believe we didn’t start using their platform earlier as I found them super-easy to setup and use for commission free stock trading. All trades are FREE and they support fractional buys, which makes it quite effective to contribute as less as $1 and as many times you can! You can sign-up via our WealthSimple referral link to earn between $5 to $3000 after your first transfer, I get a chance to earn similar cash!

Without further delays, please find below our first update of the year, which as usual starts by updating below two pages with the latest data:

• 2025 Goal tracker on homepage – With everything going on in our lives financially, after careful consideration we revised our 2025 passive income goal (more on this in next section).
• Dividend Portfolio with latest holdings

Passive Income Pie

This month, our passive income split comprised 43% of Dividends & 57% in Rental income. There was a miniscule Interest earned as well from Lending loop platform. Our 2025 goal aims income from below sources with target percentage split as mentioned:

• Dividend Income: 50.00% ($1500 per month)
• Rental Income: 32.50% ($975 per month)
• Lending Interest: 0.83% ($25 per month)
• Restaurant Earning: 16.66% ($500 per month)

Over time we will smoothen out the income percentages as we aspire. For now, we are just trying to earn as much from these sources.

Monthly Dividend Earnings

January shattered all previous records and brought us our biggest dividend check ever. This is because of our largest CIBC holding pays their dividend in Jan-Apr-Jul-Oct months and hence these will be our “super” months! Key highlights from this month’s dividend income are:

• We received dividend deposits from a 17 different entities (16 Canadian & 1 US), with total value of $1361.39, a 13% YoY increase from Jan’22
• For ease and simplicity, I consider 1 CAD = 1 USD
• Top 3 dividend contributors were CIBC, GoEasy and Telus
• We dripped 27.39 shares in total – 16.39 CIBC, 4 Algonquin, 2 Telus and 1 each from Pizza Pizza, Plaza REIT, Whitecap, Transcontinental & XAW
• We received 3 dividend raises this month: CIBC: 2.41%, Telus: 3.69% & TFI: 29.63% while XAW reduced their dividend by 0.18%
• Average monthly dividends for 2023 so far is $1361.39 or about $44 a day. By 2025, we aim to reach $1500 monthly (or $50 daily)

Dividend Goal Tracker – Planned vs Actual

We wrapped up 2022 by earning $8652.97 in dividend, missing the revised planned goal by 10%. This was still $721 a month or $23.70 daily without actually working for it! We are looking at getting $9600 in dividends this year and we started on a great note achieving 14% of our goal already. Our dividend earning strategy for this year is simple – save and invest as much as we can under our TFSA accounts and narrow down the contribution limit gap. Most of the buys under TFSA will be focused on buying companies with low yield but with a track record of double digits dividend growth rate. Due to significant investment in couple of businesses, we updated our 2025 dividend goals to lower down from $12000 to $9600 and once we have clarity on business earnings we will update our goals once again.

My Marketplace

As you can see from the PADI tracker, it was a bit of a busy month in terms of Buy-DRIP-Sell & Dividend changes. Our net Projected Annual Dividend Income (PADI) for January increased by $93.14, not a huge amount but over time and with discipline & determination, we should see much bigger increases in 5 years.

We sold Automotive Properties REIT regardless of their juicy 7% yield, since the price was almost flat in years. The proceed was used to increase our position in Toromont Industries by 22 net new shares, they currently yields 1.44% and since past 5 years averaging about 15% on both Dividend Growth rate & CAGR, with 32% payout ratio.

We also accumulated few shares of CIBC (bi-weekly RRSP buy) and EQB & MRU (bi-weekly TFSA buys). Due to tight money situation we ended our bi-weekly TFSA contributions under WealthSimple and will resume when time is appropriate. As I mentioned in the beginning of this post, WealthSimple is a commission free stock trading platform and they also support fractional stock buying meaning you can also start regular investment for as little as $1. If you don’t have WS Account and would like to try them out, you can use my WealthSimple referral link to earn $5-$3000 to invest in stocks!

On Crypto front, we did nothing at all in entire 2022 and don’t think I have any funds or appetite to deploy any more than what we currently have. Last year was pretty rough year for cryptocurrencies both in terms of price depreciation & many providers declaring bankruptcy. Unfortunately Celsius network was one such platform on which we had all our Bitcoin & Ethereum holdings and since August of 2022 they have stopped paying interests on holding cryptos & even withdrawals from their platform is halted. So money is stuck there, let’s see when we could recover our holdings. Once we are able to recover our money, we will redeploy on CoinSquare platform which apparently hold the fort pretty well when others kept collapsing! Also, once our financial situation improves we will resume investing in cryptocurrencies.

Rental Earnings

In last 1 year, the Real Estate market got heavily impacted as Bank of Canada ran havoc increasing the policy interest rate rapidly to tame the skyrocketing inflation. BOC raised the rate whopping 8 times in short duration of 11 months, increasing from 0.25% to current 4.5% and this had drastic impact on mortgage and other debt products. People started feeling the pain due to high interest market and suffered as their payable interests shot up real quick, making it difficult to make the ends meet. I know many whose monthly mortgage payments increased with each rate increase while we were fortunate not to suffer this torturous situation. Though in our case, the entire payment we are making month after months are going solely towards interest with no principal paid at all! Take a pause and think about it for a moment – the payment we will make till renewal (..in few years) will not decrease our principal at all!

Principal residence – We house-hack in our principal resident by building a legal basement unit with separate entrance. Our old readers shall know that we built a legal basement in the summer of 2021 from which we collected $1300 in rent, which went straight away towards paying off the debt we accumulated to build the unit. The rent comfortably covers ALL our annual bills for property taxes, hydro, gas, water, loan interest & maintenance (if any); I can’t even imagine paying all these bills out-of-pocket. The unit is self-sustained with a separate entrance and pathway, tenant don’t have any car and I literally see them once a month when they stop by to pay the rent. I highly recommend building a second unit if you have the possibility, it is of great help and makes financial sense in the time when almost everything is super expensive and it is getting difficult to make ends meet. 😊

Investment property 1 – Some of you may know from my Dec’21 updates that our then upstairs’ tenant stopped paying rent starting Jul’21 due to a job loss from Covid. We tried everything we could to accommodate late payments but it didn’t work out and we left with no choice than filing an eviction case with Landlord & Tenant board in Aug’21. Our first hearing was scheduled in Nov’21 and after waiting patiently on a zoom call for 5 hours, the judge ran out of time and directed us to reschedule, which could take another 3 months! It was quite a frustrating experience with LTB but fortunately our tenant left the house abruptly without telling us the same month with about $11000 in rent, utilities & LTB filing dues. We spent 5 stressful months during which we didn’t received any rent but were still obliged to pay the mortgage, taxes and all utilities, on time. We were sort of broke & happy at the same time as we left behind a horrible landlord-ship chapter. I spent entire Dec’21 renovating the property by hiring a cleaner & a painter to get rid of the smoke smell and mess they left for us. Midway I also decided to add an extra room to the house and hired set of contractors to get it done and in parallel listed the unit for renting again. As someone said – luck favors the brave; we had already lost $11000 in rents while continuing to pay all bills and then we spent another $8000 to renovate the place. The courage paid off and we found a good set of tenants starting Jan’22.

We were in deep red with this property and every thing that could go wrong did indeed went wrong except one silver lining – the basement unit rent kept coming and provided a small help with the bills. This tenant joined us in Oct’21 and so glad to say they are still with us in Jan’23 and continued paying their rent on time if not few days ahead of due dates.

Total cashflow on this property for this month is $1587.52 which is a resultant sum of all expenses (mortgage, insurance, property tax, utilities, maintenance) and all earnings (upstairs & basement rents, utilities chargeback). While this is nothing compared to the valuation of the property, we have no plans to sell it for now as this house is located in a beautiful and demanding neighborhood and the price have appreciated decently as compared to other properties we own.

Investment property 2 – This house is a new addition from last year (when I was not writing updates!) and is a joint venture with a friend of ours. We sealed quite a deal literally on the last day of offer acceptance date, it was snowing heavily so not many people turned up to see the house and put an offer. The seller agent didn’t had any offer at hand and accepted ours even when comparable from the area were quite higher than what we quoted. Later on we came to know that the house was put up for sale hurriedly as the sole elderly owner was hospitalized due to deteriorating health. After few days we were informed that the owner passed away and the deal went on a probate requiring an extension on closing date as it has to go through estate lawyer involving appropriate paperwork and clearances. One month extension was deemed appropriate by seller lawyer which we agreed to and closing happened in May’22. The house is in our names since the mortgage is in ours but our friend paid 50% of the down payment and closing costs. We have no formal documentation and just a verbal agreement – we buy two properties, one in our names and another on theirs with both of us paying 50% of all costs for each house. I know this is not ideal but it is based on pure trust, which we both have immensely on each other.

This house is a less than 10 years old detached two-storey house with unfinished basement, located in a demanding town and sought after quiet neighborhood. Our plan was to rent out the upstairs till we build a legal basement unit and flip it in approximately 6 months for a decent profit. Destiny had something else on mind and the real estate market started declining post the offer acceptance itself in Feb’22. The inventory started dwindling and sales dried up but whatever was still getting sold had higher price tag than our buying price, so we didn’t see any paper loss. Due to changed market we were forced to rethink and change our plan, instead of renovate & flip, we now had to keep it for longer (and unknown) duration. As planned we rented the upstairs unit so to cover majority of our mortgage and in parallel hired an architect to design the basement unit, after which we applied for a city permit. While we were waiting for the permit to come, we finalized our main basement building contractor and others needed for the job. Post permit approval we faced couple of major challenges of relocating the AC unit and a complicated process of gas meter movement involving Enbridge and this itself pushed our timelines by “costly” 4 weeks! At a high level the work involved making a separate side entrance by cutting the main wall, running the plumbing & HVAC through empty basement, framing as per design, run electricals as needed, put dry walls, flooring & finishing. It is a 1 bedroom unit of approximately 500 sq ft with 1 washroom and shared laundry and we had many challenges to overcome but still managed to wrap up the actual construction within 6 weeks! We still couldn’t manage the widening of driveway and concrete pathway due to colder weather and had to push it till spring (Apr-May timeframe).

While basement unit was getting built, the upstairs tenant bought his own house in Niagara and was ready to leave, within 4 months of his 6 months contract. He was quite cooperative with the ongoing construction and we were quite happy for them starting their own “story”. We were fortunate enough to finalize great tenants for both upstairs & basement starting Dec’22 itself. Our portion of cashflow for this month is $377.07 after all expenses and earnings. We have incurred additional debt to build the basement unit and even when the overall RE market is still dwindling, we managed to force a positive cashflow out of this house and in the process also appreciated the valuation of the house significantly with a legal second dwelling unit. A positive cashflow is going to help us retain this property for next couple of years at the minimum or could be more depending on the market but whenever we are good to sell, we had already ensured to make a profit.

Lending Interest Earnings

Our overall financial situation remains quite tight due to exploring and investing in too many initiatives and hence allocation towards lending stays low and I don’t see this improving any time soon. On our $2000 trial money dumped on to Lending loop platform back in 2019, we earned $14.21 in total interests from several lending loop commitments (loans). The weighted average gross annual yield (whatever that means) is 12.9% which isn’t bad for a 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. I have noticed that the new loan needs have significantly reduced post pandemic and it is both due to stringent background checks by the platform and not too many risk averse businesses wanting to get into high debt trap.

That’s it for now readers and apologies for such a long read! I came back after a year and still have so so much to share with you all and will do so gradually in subsequent monthly updates. Please do subscribe using the widget at the bottom of the page to get our once a month update, I don’t spam and you will only get an email or two in a month, whenever I post on this website.

Stay safe, stay cool, and most importantly Save-Invest-Repeat! 😊

Happy New Year! I wish and hope this new year brings new light in your lives and it lets you achieve whatever you aspire for from your life.

New years are often tagged to new goals and resolutions, and 2022 for us particularly comes up with high hopes and expectations. This year is of extreme significance financially and I realize so much need to be accomplished including seeing one business get into profit, another business get up and running, buy another investment property (solo or partnership), try to close the TFSA contribution gap as much as possible, attain $300K portfolio valuation, hit $12K in annual dividends! The last two aspirations will become reality on its own if we are able to invest about $50K in our TFSA accounts. This year is probably one of the most important in recent years, let’s see how it goes! 🤞

December as usual is an exciting month in my 9-5 world, we get to know our annual salary raise and also get our bonus. Banking sectors did very well in 2021 especially mortgage and personal loan areas boomed due to low interest rate. Consumer debts are at all time high and people are borrowing to invest or buy properties, fueling the price to unrealistic valuations. We received larger than normal raise and also a generous bonus. Normally I route the bonus money directly to RRSP as it saves tax now (..of course to be paid later at withdrawal) but as my aim is to eliminate our lifetime TFSA contribution limits, I chose to take the cash with about 43% upfront tax deduction and put the money in our TFSA accounts and a bit to buy cryptocurrencies. It sucks to pay this much in taxes but my thought process towards RRSP changed ever since I read Tawcan’s interview series with a couple earning $30K in monthly tax efficient dividends, their recommendation was to give priority to TFSA over RRSP for long term benefits.

I realize once again we are super late with our monthly updates and needless to say the beginning of year was super-busy with so much going on. Without further delay, here’s our monthly updates for December, which as usual starts 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 96% of Dividends and 4% in Interests from Lending loop & Celsius. We again did not had any positive cash-flow from our rental property.

As many of our regular readers may know that amidst 2020 Covid lockdown, we carefully put together our 2025 financial goals, which was based on the foundation of diversified and sustainable long term semi-passive incomes. Our income sources include 3 different areas as mentioned below along with percentage split, which we plan to attain by 2025.

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

So far the reality is far from the plan but we will work on smoothening out the ratios and increasing our earnings in each of the categories. Back in 2021 we also partnered with few of our friends to wet our toe into a restaurant & grocery businesses. A lot of funds went into these businesses and while the restaurant is operational since Sept’21 the grocery store is still in planning phase and we aim to open by Apr’22. Once we are clear on the cash-flow, I will add it to the diversity pie and adjust various income percentages accordingly.

Monthly Dividend Earnings

Nov’21 was quite a slow dividend month for us and we didn’t even reach $200 mark. Comparatively Dec’21 is a much better month, key points from this month’s dividend income are:

• We received dividend deposits from a whopping 23 different entities (21 Canadian & 2 US), with total value of $579.59, a 0.35% decrease from Dec’20
• For ease and simplicity, I consider USD at par with CAD
• Top 3 dividend contributors were Enbridge, Suncor and Exxon Mobil
• We dripped 7 shares in total – 2 Enbridge and 1 each for Diversified Royalty, Pizza Pizza, Plaza REIT, Suncor & Sylogist
• We received dividend raises from astounding 7 companies this month: Suncor – 100%, Alimentation Couche-Tard – 25.71%, Manulife – 18%, Fortis – 5.94%, Diversified Royalty – 4.57%, OTEX – 2.11% & Exxon Mobil – 1.15%. This is the most raises we ever received, before this we got 5 increases in Sept’21
• We also received a special dividend of $5 from A&W for holding 100 shares!
• Average monthly dividends for 2021 is $564.58 or about $18.56 a day. By 2025, we aim to reach $2500 monthly (or about $80 daily).

Dividend Goal Tracker – Planned vs Actual

In 2020 we beat dividend goal by achieving 112% against planned target but in 2021 we could reach only 80% of our goal. While it is a bit disheartening not to achieve our goals, we reached new highs in annual dividend income. We also know the reasons why we didn’t meet so it is not a complete disaster! As I mentioned in many of our past monthly updates, we invested significant money towards two businesses and hence couldn’t focus much on investing in dividend earning stocks. Besides we also changed our dividend investing strategy a bit by focusing more on growth stocks (with less to no yield) instead of high dividend payers. Both these factors contributed towards us not meeting the annual goal. Our strategy will remain more or less the same for 2022 as well and hence we will update our long term 2025 goals accordingly at a suitable time.

My Marketplace

It was a busy month in terms of Buy-Sell and also as mentioned above, DRIPs & Dividend raises. With all the dividend increases itself, our Projected Annual Dividend Income (PADI) increased by $199.04, this is the main reason why we are refocusing on dividend growth stocks for next few years and accumulate as many high dividend growers as we can! With 7 dripped shares from different companies, it also increased our PADI by another $10.28. So basically we increased our annual dividend by $209.32 by doing nothing and that’s the beauty of dividend investing that many don’t understand. It surely requires determination, discipline and patience to see the results.

This month we sold Viemed Healthcare & Banxa Holdings – both were small and speculative positions with no dividends. While Viemed was sold at a profit of 8.65%, Banxa returned us 27.85% on our investment. The proceeds along with accumulated dividends were used to buy – 42 shares of Manulife ($55.44 in annual dividend), 10 shares of Pembina pipelines ($25.20 in annual dividend), 54 shares of Suncor ($90.72 in annual dividend), 25 shares of Royal bank ($120 in annual dividend) & 23 shares of Enbridge ($79.12 in annual dividend). These buys will contribute total of $370.48 towards our PADI and since all these transactions were in our TFSA accounts, neither the price appreciation nor the dividend earnings have any tax burden on us in future!

Lastly, our automated bi-weekly payroll deduction in RRSP account bought us 2.33 CIBC shares ($13.61 in annual dividends). And our bi-weekly payday contribution of $500 to WealthSimple TFSA accounts (Self & wife) bought us – 6 shares of Equitable Bank ($4.44 in annual dividend), 0.57 shares of Royal bank ($2.74 in annual dividend) in my account & 6 shares of Metro Inc ($6 in annual dividend), 1.3 shares of Brookfield Asset Management ($0.68 in annual dividend) in wife’s account. 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. For readers who don’t know, we opened WealthSimple TFSA accounts in Nov’21 to buy stocks on bi-weekly basis to expedite our TFSA contribution and exhaust the limit. The purchases with WealthSimple are commission free and they also support fractional stock buying meaning you can also start regular investment for as little as $1, feel free to sign-up using our WealthSimple referral link to get 2 stocks valued up to $4500. We live in a pretty exciting time where platforms like them provide us an opportunity to be part of stock world for a paltry sum, there is no excuse to start building your future, today!

All the Buys (manual & automated), DRIPs and Dividend raises in Dec’21 increased our projected annual dividend earnings by $607.26 brining our total projected income to $7783.90!

On Crypto front, we put my 2021 Christmas bonus money to use and contributed $1000 to buy Ethereum & $500 towards Bitcoin. If you haven’t tracked crypto market lately, let me tell you majority of the cryptocurrencies have dropped 30%-40% each in last couple of months! I plan to continue adding to my these positions especially Bitcoin whenever I have some spare money, till the valuation reaches 5% of our total investment. I don’t intend to put anymore and also I will officially start tracking under our portfolio once combined crypto valuation reaches $10,000 or more. Our Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin are currently stored under two separate wallets CoinSquare & Celsius. I am using CoinSquare to buy currencies and then transfer it over to Celsius, which pays weekly interests on 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. They also have regular promos to earn in-kind currency when you transfer them from other wallets. There are ongoing Ethereum promos to earn $20 when you transfer $500, $200 when you transfer $5000 or $600 when you transfer $20000 worth of Ethereum; all these amounts are in USD.

As I mentioned in our one of our past monthly 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 – We collected $1200 in rent from our basement apartment tenant which went right away towards paying off debt (mostly interest and a bit of principal) we accumulated to build the basement. Even though the basement is not generating a positive cashflow and mostly the rent just offset expenses, we still count this rent as an earning.

Investment property 1 – We have incurred heavy debt throughout 2021 since our previous tenant didn’t paid the rent for 5 months and we spent money in December to add another bedroom (..carved out of huge living room), painting & cleaning. We also finalized our upstairs tenant who will start renting the place from 1-Jan onwards and have already completed the paperwork. After months of going through agony and frustration, finally this property will be back on track with positive cash-flow, well the incoming rent will go towards the debt repayment but we are still happy! Addition of the third bedroom was instinctive and now when we think about it, it was worth to spend $7500 to reap long term price appreciation and valuation of the property.

Lending Interest Earnings

This month we earned $13.99 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 $7.76 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 in Oct 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! 😊

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

This month, our passive income split comprised of 88% of Dividends and 12% in Interests from Lending loop & Celsius. We again did not had any positive cash-flow from our rental property.

As you may know, amidst Covid last year I carefully put together our 2025 financial goals, which is based on the foundation of diversified and sustainable long term semi-passive incomes. So far our income sources include 3 different areas as mentioned below along with percentage split which we plan to attain by 2025. The reality as of now is far from the plan but we will work on smoothening out the ratios.

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

Earlier this year we also partnered with few of our friends and dipped our toe into a restaurant & grocery businesses. While restaurant is operational since past 3 months, the grocery store is still in planning phase and we aspire to open it by March of 2022. Once we are clear on the cash-flow, I will add it to the diversity pie and adjust various income percentages accordingly. Since a lot of cash went into the restaurant, we will have to decrease the planned earnings from other sources as we couldn’t allocate money to increase respective income flows.

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! 😊

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! 😊

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! 😊