Archive | October, 2010

Weekend Ramblings and PF Blog Love: SPG Love Edition

By Young on October 29, 2010 in weekend ramblings

My blissful week of vacationing in Hawaii is almost coming to an end, sad to say. I have managed to squeeze in some blogging activities while here thanks to the free internet included in the hotel fees. The Sheraton group of hotels in Honolulu have incorporated a mandatory “resort fee” for certain stays (I believe “tour groups” are excluded, but we had to pay this resort fee as we had the discounted cash and points redemption with the SPG points) ranging from $12 to $20 a night but it includes:

60 minutes of international calling
nightly free parking for one car ($25 value)
included internet access in rooms (a $14 value)
unlimited local calls
included bottled water (1L a day)

Not too bad, in my opinion! We didn’t have to hang out at Starbucks or Macdonalds to leech off the free wifi, after all.

In other news, I think I satisfied the deprived sleep bank quota for a long time. I haven’t slept so much in a year! Very thankful for this opportunity. The Blue Hawaiian that knocked me out (very strong- what can I say, I’m a cheap drunk!) also helped get me into snooze-nap mode. I also got to finally finish reading the Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham and will work on a review post on it. Intelligent Investor in a nutshell- awesome.

Young and Thrifty was mentioned in these round ups- A sincere thanks to you guys!

Canadian Capitalist’s This and That round up
Invest it Wisely- Weekend Reading: Fall Edition
B Simple- Simple Sunday Personal Finance Round Up
Dividend Monk- Weekend Reading
Boomer and Echo’s What’s New around the Blogosphere

Here are some of my favourite posts of the week (they’re all Canadian PF bloggers- am I home sick for some Canada?):

The Passive Income Earner has a great post on the burning question: Which Canadian Bank should you Own?
Boomer and Echo talks about Canadian Savings Bonds in depth
My Own Advisor gives us a dividend income update
SavingMentor tells us how to get 40x the Shoppers Optimum points
Canadian Finance Blog tells us how to start an internet business from home
Arjun over at Investing Thesis talks ETF’s

Have yourselves a fantastic weekend, guys!

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youngandthrifty’s Dividend Yields

By Young on October 27, 2010 in investing

In the previous post I blabbered on about how amazing dividends are. They really are amazing- once you start investing in them you can’t stop! They’re like Pringles Chips. You can’t have just one.

I didn’t realize their potential until recently, and since then, my portfolio has been lookin’ pretty fine. I’ve recouped all of my losses since I started investing in the first place about 5 years ago (the losses are thanks to the dreaded “other investments” )(NB: the best way to learn how to invest is to do it and learn from your own experience!), and am well in the glorious green.

A few months ago, I calculated the dividend yields of all the dividend producing stocks I own. Doing this reinforces me NOT SELL prematurely because of the dividend yield I will get per year. It switches my mentality from: “sell this thing and take profit” to “if it dips, then I’m picking up more”. My goal is to be able to increase my positions on dividend yielding stock, so that I can not only reinvest it to build my portfolio further, but hopefully one day it can replace my income (or a large portion of it) and I can retire early at 35.

Wishful thinking, huh?

I wrote the % return per annum and the resultant amount in $ that I would get per year with the number of stocks I own.

Without further delay, here’s a list of my annual yield from dividends (and income trust distributions):

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Dividends… Explained!

By Young on October 25, 2010 in investing

Do you like my camera skills? I love the iPhone- its so easy- take a picture and send it to myself in an email and….voila! A picture for my blog is ready! Anyway, I digress, we’re talking about dividends here.

So what are dividends?

They’re something magical. They’re great. Win-win in terms of taxation. They’re tax efficient.

Dividends, according to Investopedia are profits from the company and they can be either reinvested into the company or paid out in the form of dividends:

“Dividends may be in the form of cash, stock or property. Most secure and stable companies offer dividends to their stockholders. Their share prices might not move much, but the dividend attempts to make up for this.”

I like the words “secure” and “stable”. Usually only big time companies (corporations) offer dividends to their stockholders. High growth companies reinvest their earnings into the company to make the company grow bigger and faster. High growth companies’ share prices may move more.

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