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”.
Tag Archives: Investing
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!
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!
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.
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?
November Divided Income from YOU the Bloggers!
One month to go for 2016! In the midst of being snowed in, shoveling 2-3x per day, we have compiled the list of dividend income from the bloggers in the community. We’re sure you all know the drill, each month, we first publish our dividend income summaries (Bert’s here and Lanny’s here) and then aggregate as many as we can from ALL OF YOU in the dividend growth investing community. SO if we didn’t include you this month, please understand it is not personal and is more of a result of timing! Now, time to dive in and check out our November Dividend Income summary from all of you dividend bloggers in the community!
Lessons Learned About Setting Goals
It is that time of the year. To me, December means finishing out the year strong, racing towards the finish line, and setting the table for a successful year going forward. For the last few weeks, I have been thinking long and hard about my life, investing, and our blog goals. What should I focus on? Where should I be at this point next year? Questions like these have racing through my mind and I am trying to process and make sense of them all. I’ve been thinking a lot about the goals I have set from the prior year and trying to leverage them as much as possible, including both the successes and the shortcomings. I thought it would be helpful for me, and hopefully some of you, to write down my thoughts and lessons learned over the last few years about setting goals. Time to dive in.