Weekly Roundup - June 14, 2014

It's been a busy and fun week.  I've been back to the grind at work now and I can't say I'm all that excited about it.  Especially now that my wife is on summer break and has loads of free time.  It makes it that much more difficult to be away from her when I know we could be spending lots of time together.  After all that's the whole reason we're striving for financial independence.  But the good news is that my wife drove down to come and see me yesterday and we got to be together.  We're trying to see what will be going on with my work for tonight to decide whether she should stay or not.  That's the joy of having a job that can completely screw up plans like that.

After being fairly quiet with my portfolio over the last 1-2 months I've gone on a bit of a buying spree.  Is is the best time to be investing capital?  I'm not really sure, but as long as I can find quality companies at reasonable valuations I'm going to continue to invest.  I'm still undecided on whether to pursue real estate investing and becoming a landlord so in the meantime I've started to invest more capital in the markets.  It just doesn't make sense to me to have $30k sitting in a savings account earning next to nothing.  I added to my position in Wal-Mart early this week as well as initiated a new position and added to another.  I've only put about $5k to work but it feels good to be able to invest some capital again.  For those of you that don't follow me on Twitter@JC_PIP you're just going to have to wait to find out about the other two purchases.  I still might change my mind on real estate but it just doesn't seem like it's going to work for us at this time.  Although that's probably just me over-analyzing the whole thing.



Thanks again to everyone that stopped by, commented or shared posts from Passive-Income-Pursuit.  I truly appreciate it and love to hear your own stories and ideas and I can't spread the word about dividend growth investing and financial independence with all of your help.  Earlier this week I wrote about alternative brokerages and I've gotten quite a few responses, if you haven't yet answered my poll question please do so because I want to try and get a post written up about the results for next week.  Besides that and some new purchases to announce I've also got some other ideas working around in my head.  Feel free to come do my day job for me while I work on those posts.


Now on to the links!

Does being a stockholder affect your purchase decisions? by Dividend Growth Journey - Before I started investing and really paying attention to the brands that fall under each company, I couldn't have told you who made what except for the obvious ones (Coca-Cola, PepsiCo...).  It doesn't completely change my decisions but if there's two similar products at a similar price point and comparable quality then I'm going with the one that a company I own makes.

Dividends are a return of capital and a return on capital by Dividend Mantra - It's a simple concept to understand but something that you just don't realize on the surface.  Each and every dividend payment that you receive takes risk off the table because you're getting a return of capital.  Hold quality companies that continue to increase their dividends for decades and you'll eventually get to play with the house's money.

The HOW and WHY of our desired portfolio by Income Surfer - Bryan talks about their portfolio allocation.  It's your allocation that will help to keep you from doing something stupid when the markets inevitably take a turn for the worse.

10 Seeking Alpha authors you should be following by Dividend Growth Stock Investing - Besides all of the great blogs that cover dividend growth investing there's also another great independent research source available for free, Seeking Alpha.  Now anyone can join and write articles but the cream rises to the top.  Dan lists 10 of the heavy hitters in the dividend growth investing space and you'll be well served to follow them.  And of course I think Dan and myself should be added to that list as well. ;)

What if Twitter stock was valued like Visa? by The Conservative Income Investor - Now don't get me wrong, even in a fairly conservative dividend growth portfolio there's still room for those hyper growth stocks, errr potentially hyper growth stocks.  But you need to be extremely careful when investing there.  The valuations often times get stretched well beyond reasonable.

The danger of having an absolute yield target by Clear Eyes Investing - For those trying to reach financial independence primarily through dividend growth investing we all want to get to that point as quickly as possible.  However, it's important to keep in mind that the end game is a stable and annually growing dividend.  If you focus on the income target and what yield you need to get there you'll be pressed into high yield companies that usually carry much greater risk and are usually concentrated in very few sectors.

Colgate-Palmolive: Great company, expensive dividend stock by Dividend Ladder - Colgate-Palmolive is a great American business success story.  They've paid dividends for 119 years with 51 consecutive years of increases.  However, no matter how great the company is there's times where Mr. Market pushes the valuation to an extreme.  Now is one of those times for Colgate-Palmolive.

My crazy little investment and life story towards 2 million by Asset-Grinder - I really like it when bloggers go through the reasons why they settled on dividend growth investing as a primary investment objective.  Asset-Grinder is fairly new to the blog scene but his story is truly amazing.

Roadmap2Retire turns one by Roadmap2Retire - Congratulations on reaching one year for Roadmap2Retire.  To those that don't blog it might not seem like that big of an accomplishment but I'm coming up on three years in November for my own little blog and it's anything but a passive hobby.  Also check out Solar is getting it's time in the sun.

Margin of safety in financial independence by Dividend Growth Investor - Just like with investing we all strive to have a built in margin of safety when we purchase a company.  And financial independence is no different.  If your goal is to live off the dividends from the companies that you own then you'll need to continue to build up redundancies for your overall plan.

Do we need a recession for a meaningful correction in stocks? by A Wealth of Common Sense - Mr. Market sure is fickle.  The generally accepted concept is that the markets are priced for the economic situation 6 months from now.  However, Mr. Market doesn't always get it right.  We don't need a recession in order to get a correction in the stock market.

Warren Buffet's $12 billion Disney mistake by Joshua Kennon - More often than not, companies that have shown to be winners and have a nearly impenetrable moat continue to go on and be winners in the future.  It's important to remember this because Mr. Market is occasionally going to tempt you with the opportunity to take a profit.

I hope you all have a great weekend!

Comments

  1. Thanks for sharing my post JC. Have a great weekend.
    -Bryan

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  2. Thanks for the double mention, JC. Hope you are having a good weekend.

    regards

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  3. Really appreciate the mention buddy. Great reading list this week. Loved the last Buffet story. Time seems to stand still for me during the weekend when the markets are closed.

    Good Day and Grind all Sunday!

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  4. Pursuit,

    Thanks for including me. Much appreciated.

    And glad to see you buying stocks again! Always good to compare notes. :)

    Hope you had a good weekend.

    Best wishes!

    ReplyDelete

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