Stocks to Look Forward to in 2017

Now that 2016 is coming to an end, I am very excited to ring in the New Year, that’s for sure.  Putting back up the Christmas Tree, cleaning out any items that are needing to be thrown away and creating more simpleness in my house had me thinking about the big stocks I’m looking forward to in 2017.  There are many reasons why I am trying to look at things more from a “bigger picture” and refining/tightening/sharpening a focused strategy in 2017, as it relates to investing.  The S&P 500 is up over 10% through Christmas and due diligence is going to be that much more “fun”.

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Bert’s 2017 Goals

With 2016 coming to a close and New Years rapidly approaching, we are running out of time to publish our 2017 goals so that we can hit the ground running on January 1st and sprint towards the finish line.  If you haven’t noticed, the two of us have spent a lot of time thinking about taking the right approach to the goal setting process.  We are not aiming to cross a low bar here on this website.  Instead, we have taken months to find purpose driven goals that are challenging and are going to push us.  Will it be comfortable achieving all of these goals…no!  But is that really the point of the goal setting process?  We want to sweat, we want to force ourselves to scrape every dollar together….we want to feel the burn.  Man, I’m starting to sound like Lanny here.  After a month of brainstorming, number crunching, and debates, here they are, my five 2017 goals!

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Portfolio Update – Introducing Our Family Portfolio

For the last few years, I have reported religiously the happenings of my portfolio and every cent in dividend income I have received.  Looking back, it is insane to see how fast my portfolio has grown in such a short period time and I love seeing similar growth rates in so many other people in the dividend investing community.  Man is it a lot of fun!  But there has been one key piece of the equation I have kept under wraps from all of you…the happening of my wife’s portfolio and the impact it is having on our “Family Dividend Income” and not just mine.  So for the first time on this blog, I would like to discuss my wife’s investment portfolio and briefly discuss how I will begin reporting things differently here on our blog!

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Defining a Goal and Understanding It’s Purpose

Ah.. the candles are burning, the coffee is brewing and the mind is turning.  This is typically the time of year when we start thinking, writing down and developing the upcoming year goals and what is needed to be done in order to reach those goals.  As we start to write them down, one can literally write anything as their goal, such as, jump three inches higher, have the greenest grass, make the best bologna sandwich, write an article about the best bacon; you get the drift.  This article is really to hone in on not just establishing goals and the stones to walk on to get there, but the “why” to your goal, the “purpose” to what you are setting out to accomplish.  This is very important and a great time to take time to search for that purpose for what you are setting out to do.

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The 5 Most Important Factors for Us When Buying a House

If you haven’t picked up on this yet, after we stated earlier in the year we were not in a hurry to buy a house, my wife and I are beginning to ramp up the process for buying a house.  Wow is it a complicated, intense, and fast-moving process.   We’ve read articles, listened to countless hours of conversations with family/friends, and co-workers, and fallen asleep too many nights to HGTV in our effort to gather as much information as possible.  Buying a house is such a major life decision and we are going to take our time with the decision.   We are finalizing on our list of things that are the most important to the two of us and it only seemed fitting to whittle our list down to a five.

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Crushing $8,000 in Projected Dividend Income

December 2016.  Almost 6 months after I posted about crushing over the $7,000 mark, I have now jumped over the next rung on the projected dividend income high jump bar.  It couldn’t have come at a better time, when weeks are frustrating with traffic pile-ups from snow, working later hours for “the man” and the holiday season upon us.  To say I didn’t think I was going to reach this goal would be a lie, I knew I would get here.  I just knew it.  Luck has quite a bit to do with it, but I had faith and confidence in the actions I was doing, that I would get to the new height.  In this post I will share what I did to arch the back over the $8,000 in projected dividend income bar!

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Is This Stock Market Begging Me to Pay Down My Student Loans?

Each day I watch the stock market in awe.  At 4 PM EST, I read a headline like “Stock Market Sets New Record” and when I log online in the morning I am reading an article about how the market is up in the pre-market once again.   By the end of the day, it is like de ja vu and I start the process all over again.  This market makes finding stocks the meet our stock screener difficult, how could it not?  Well, I have been thinking a lot about where I want to allocate my capital recently and what I want my next move to be.   After doing some research on various blogs, including some articles written by my fellow Diplomat, I find myself considering the option that the title of the article outlines.  Is now the time to accelerate the payments on my student loans?

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