Throughout the year you donate to charities and then either save the emailed receipt or try and remember to save the mailed receipt that the non-profits send out. Does this process seem similar to anyone else? For years I did this and tried to make it as easy as possible when it came to doing my taxes by scanning everything into PDF format and saving it in an encrypted folder labeled by the year the donation happened. While the tax benefit isn’t the point of the donation, obviously, it is still a nice feature that should be taken advantage of. Enter donor-advised funds. Most larger financial i ..read more

In the last few months I’ve completely changed my mind on the “crypto” industry. Here’s the backstory: I’m hoping it wasn’t the case for any of you reading this, but I lost some money trusting Celsius with my stablecoins. Fortunately, after the Celsius bankruptcy, I promptly removed all the crypto and stablecoins from the other centralized lending platforms that I was also using, such as Nexo, Blockfi, and Gemini. Nexo is still up-and-running, but Gemini and Blockfi are struggling. Blockfi may be going bankrupt and Gemini paused withdrawals. Both of them use Genesis as their backbone for the l ..read more

The Past – Web2 Cloud Backup I have a Synology NAS that I use to backup all computers in my house, store media, host Plex, and also use it as a Time Machine backup for my Mac computers. I bought the DS 412+ over a decade ago and it is still working perfectly fine. This provides some redundancy in the RAID5 setup on the NAS. However, should something happen to the house or this device be stolen, then most data would be lost. I have some files stored across various free accounts like Dropbox, Box, Mega, OneDrive, and Google Drive. I forget what the Dropbox free storage amount is, but I’ve had it ..read more

I’m still alive and investing. I can’t believe it has been over a year since I last posted. We are currently in the process of building our house so all of my taxable brokerage is currently in cash and ready to pay for the house. I haven’t been able to do as much dividend investing because of this. However, despite not having as much available to invest in the traditional sense, I am still maxing out my work 401k and our Roth IRAs. I am doing some less traditional things my 401k, which will be a post for another day. In addition to the more traditional investing, quite a large portion of my po ..read more

I was researching this topic prior to the November 2020 election. At that time, the consensus was that there would be a “blue wave” with Democrats picking up more seats in the House and winning a clear majority in the Senate, in addition to winning the Presidency. (While I will talk about politics a little bit here because I have to, I dislike politics because politicians really only care about themselves and staying in power. More on this and pork-barrel spending in another post.) As we now know, polling was again not quite accurate this year. Republicans managed to pick up some seats in the ..read more

Since I’ve been fairly quiet on the blog front, I wanted to give an update on finances and how things are going in 2020. 2020 has been interesting from a financial perspective. It started out fairly innocuous. My business had another good end of the year for 2019 and we were awarded financially with an excellent end of the year distribution. This was mostly set aside to help pay for the downpayment on our new house. Then Covid-19 hit. As business owners, we all took substantial salary cuts and suspended distributions. We also got a number of random “vacation” days. I put that in quotes because ..read more

Scott @ Two Investing: Today’s post is a guest post from our friends at Sure Dividend about the benefits of dividends stocks to a long-term investor. Without spoiling the ending, I love their example dividend paying stock. It’s in the biotech space and not only pays a great dividend but has the benefit of growth as well. Another benefit to dividend investing in the time of COVID-19 is that it is a way to get better yield than the 10-year treasuries while being seemingly backstopped by a Fed willing to spend whatever it takes to keep the money flowing. The large technology stocks like Apple and ..read more

Okay. This isn’t entirely true. We still owe equities in my wife’s Roth IRA and within my 401k. However, circumstances “forced” me to sell all the stocks in my taxable brokerage account. Here’s the story below: One of my tenets of investing is that any money that you may need in the next 5 years should not be invested in stocks. The reason for this is that the stock market can be quite volatile (such as with the last few months of the COVID-19 pandemic or the Global Financial Crisis). While it historically has gone up in the long run, there have been periods where it has taken around 5 years t ..read more

This April I received $284.05, compared with $333.00 in April 2019. The decrease comes from a lower number of companies paying me this month. Symbol Dividend Amount CSCO $45.62 DEO $59.98 KO $40.90 O $22.11 VTR $115.44 April 2020 Dividends Total dividends for April 2020: $284.05 Total cumulative dividend income for 2019: $3133.48 Forward 12-Month Dividends: $2821.81 Hourly wage based on 40 hour work week (2087 hrs): $1.35/hour Hourly wage based on non-stop work (8760 hrs): $0.32/hour ..read more

The recent market volatility relating to Covid-19 has been difficult. In the longterm, I am optimistic that the economy will recover and stock prices will rebound. Another decade from now, I bet this period will be looked back on as a good buying opportunity that developed amidst a horrible global health event. In the short-term, the stoppage of large parts of the economy and even shutting down all production in parts of entire countries, is scary. Most people I know have been affected by the virus. Many are either laid off, some are furloughed, and most have at least had hours cut. Despite be ..read more