Weekly Roundup - April 22, 2017

Happy Weekend!  Check out what's been going on in my world and some of the best articles from around the blogosphere.

I missed last week's Weekly Roundup because it was finally time to head back home which was more than welcome.  Unfortunately I knew it was going to be a quick turnaround before heading back to work so that meant we were busy, busy for the time I was home.  Although I can't complain one bit because I got to spend time with my wife and daughter.  We met up with some friends, spent some time walking around a botanical garden near our house and visited family on Easter.  There might not have been much relaxing going on, but it sure was worth it.  All in all it was a great few days at the house.

Two weeks ago I finally finished up our taxes and we ended up being in a bit of an unexpected position.  We made too much money to max out tax deductible contributions to Traditional IRA's and we were about 80% through the phaseout range.  I didn't want to forego making the 2x $990 tax deductible contributions because that works out to a $495 tax savings, but having those small accounts lying around isn't going to be fun.  I'm still debating what to do with my wife's Traditional IRA, but we decided to open up a Roth IRA as well since we couldn't max out a Traditional.  So that mean $4,510 into a Roth IRA that we'll never have to pay taxes on again.

Instead of just going the traditional DGI route I wanted to continue with my dive into options trading.  As many of you know I've started pursuing option trading quite heavily this year.  One of the big reasons I started this is because I'm looking for other ways to generate income so every avenue is a possibility.  The big drawback to options trading was that commissions were quite high; however, costs are coming down and there's a new broker on the block called TastyWorks.  They are the guys that built the Think or Swim platform which I've heard is fantastic and the new TastyWorks brokerage is really geared towards options trading with some of the lowest costs you can find for retail investors.  

Their commission schedule is $1 per option contract to open and $0 to close.  Even if you don't want to use them for options they do have a pretty sweet deal where it's $5 per stock purchase and $0 to sell on those too.  

Now it's time for the shameless plug.  *Affiliate link incoming*  If you're interested in opening an account with TastyWorks I'd appreciate it if you do so with this link. 

In other brokerage news Loyal3 will be shutting down in May.  I really liked the brokerage because who doesn't like $0 commissions.  It was really great in the beginning when they allowed you to make purchases with credit cards so you could do some cash back arbitrage and effectively get 1-2% discounts on the purchases.  However, it wasn't long until that went away and now the entire brokerage will be shut down.  If you have an account there Dividend Growth Investor has a good write up about what you need to do regarding your account.

I know exactly what I want to do while not being 100% sure what we'll do.  One option that Loyal3 is having is to roll your funds into a new FolioFirst account, but I don't want to do that at all which is the part that I know for sure what I'll be doing.  The part that I'm not quite sure about yet is whether to transfer all of the whole shares that I own to an existing account that I have OR just sell out of everything (ugh...taxable events), take the cash and open a new brokerage account OR sell out of everything and use the cash to pay off debts.  The current value of my portfolio there is just under $4k so it's not a huge sum of money and I don't know if there's a clear winner here.

If you have an account at Loyal3 what are you looking at doing?  FolioFirst?  Transferring your whole shares to a new brokerage?  Or just cashing out and moving the funds to a new brokerage?  

On to the Roundup

In case you missed them, here's the posts from Passive-Income-Pursuit over the past week.

• Help Me Out: Traditional or Roth IRA
• Dividend Update - March 2017
• 9 Option Moves to Boost My Investment Income
• 14 More Option Moves to Boost My Investment Income
• Dividend Growth Investing at Work - 61 Years and Counting
• Net Worth Update - March 2017
• Dividend Growth Investing at Work - 20 Consecutive Quarters of Dividend Raises
• 18 Option Positions to Boost My Investment Income
• Dividend Growth Investing at Work - Feel Good, Look Good and Build Your Wealth

Also, be sure to sign up to receive posts via email and to follow me on Twitter@JC_PIP so you don't miss anything.  You can also follow me on Facebook or Pinterest if you prefer those methods to get your daily fix and keep up to date on happenings around here.

Once again I'd like to say thanks to each and every one of you that read, commented, and shared posts from here this past week.  This dividend growth investing and financial independence community is amazing and the openness from everyone is awesome.  Thanks again!

Now on to the links!

The State of Retail by Income Surfer

17 Dividend Aristocrats for Further Research by Dividend Growth Investor

Strive to Wake Up and Do Nothing (With Your Finances) by Retire Before Dad

Notes From The First Week of Freedom by 1500 Days to Freedom

Quarterly Update - Q1 2017 by Roadmap2Retire

Two Recent Sells by DivGro

Bert's Recent Buy: CVS Health Corp (CVS) by Dividend Diplomats

The Wit and Wisdom of Warren Buffett by Dividend Growth Stocks

Dividend Aristocrat Cardinal Health (CAH) Drops 12% - Buying Opportunity or Value Trap? by Simply Safe Dividends

Recent Stock Purchase II April 2017 by DivHut

The Best Sales Tactic in Finance by A Wealth of Common Sense

And Now For Something On Index Funds by Jason Zweig

If you're looking for investment ideas, A Frugal Family's Journey maintains a list of stock analyses and recent buys from fellow bloggers.

I hope you all have a great weekend!  

Image courtesy of Gubgib via FreeDigitalPhotos