It’s that time again: Dividend Season! I look forward to it like I imagine people look forward to Christmas, but this happens 4 times a year! Let’s see how we made out this quarter. I received $881.27, which is awesome. That’s 42% more than last year! Since I started investing in 2014 I’ve received $7,380.32 in dividends – that’s almost a full month of my current salary without having to work that’s just dropped into my lap. Insanity! Let’s see if we can top that next quarter (Spoiler: I think we can 😉 ).
Category: Finance
$275,000 Net Worth
This milestone feels weird to me and I’m not sure why. In January of this year I quickly hit $250,000 net worth thanks to a crazy market, which then entered a correction. It’s taken a few months to get back to where I was now. After adding in my latest paychecks and the market being up 3% we have arrived here. Continue reading “$275,000 Net Worth”
Saying No To A Discount Vacation
I keep surprising myself with what I say no to during this journey to early retirement. My friend and former colleague works at a company that offers discounted stays at a Four Seasons in Mexico. It looks beautiful (see above). Their rooms usually start at $400/night and we would get to stay for $75/night so $37.50/person/night. That’s a crazy discount. We would also receive half priced food and drinks…which would probably bring them to regular restaurant prices. Continue reading “Saying No To A Discount Vacation” Simple Living Like A Princess
I’ve always been fairly frugal. I’ve always bought generic brand everything – maybe it’s because I was in advertising, but I knew that the only difference was the label. I didn’t see the point. When I cracked down on my budget at the end of 2014 and started paying attention to what I was spending and trying to reduce it I discovered that the one place that wasn’t out of control was my grocery budget…possibly because I didn’t cook 🙂 . Continue reading “Simple Living Like A Princess”
Projected Retirement Budget
As an exercise I wanted to make sure that my retirement budget of $20,000 could include my current spending and items I need to add in retirement, which I’ll detail below. I’m happy to report that it’s looking really good! Let’s see what’s inside: Continue reading “Projected Retirement Budget”
Market Noise > Contributions
This graph was made by the lovely Four Pillar Freedom.
We’ve reached the threshold. My monthly contributions to my investments are almost completely obscured by the market noise. I now add 2% of my current net worth to my investments each month and recent daily fluctuations have been more than that: Down 2.5%, Up 2% etc. I think I’ve reached what a new favorite blogger of mine Four Pillar Freedom describes as the point when the market makes a bigger impact than your contributions. Continue reading “Market Noise > Contributions”
A Minimum Wage Employee By My Side
I just realized that my passive income from investments (assuming an average 7% market return) has now surpassed what a minimum wage employee would make working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. WOWZA! At the beginning of 2018 I had $237,000, which would generate $16,590 at 7% while a minimum wage employee would receive $15,080. That’s wild!
I have an invisible minimum wage employee working hella hard while I sleep, away from my day job, which I think is a very cool idea. I’ve touched on this phenomenon in a previous post, but she was just a teenager working part time after school then. Now she’s a full-timer. This just got serious!
Now we should probably working on raising that minimum wage (Washington did recently) so the average isn’t so low!
A Flat Market = No Problem
The end of Q1 2018 has me at about 0% market gains for the year (while the S&P 500 is down -1.22%). This inspired me to do a thought experiment. What if the highly improbable happened and the market remains stagnant at a 0% gain until I retire? How long would that add to my working career? My initial thought was several years since the average of 7% would add $17,850 to my current portfolio so my savings for the year would be made of approximately 20% gains and 80% savings. Continue reading “A Flat Market = No Problem”