Greetings my upwardly mobile friends, 3/31/21- The Q1 update for passive income from my experimental dividend portfolio has arrived. As you can see, it’s earned over $1500 for Q1 and is on pace to earn over $6000 for the year. Source Q1 Passive Income PGX $274.36 PFF $159.25 SCHD $296.55 SPYD $572.73 VYM $204.07 VTI $55.13 EIRL $0.00 Interest $0.04 Individual Stocks $7.47 Total $1569.61 The post 2021 Passive Income Report appeared first on The Upwardly Mobile Life ..read more

Greetings my upwardly mobile friends, I decided to write this post about buy-sell spreads because the #silversqueeze trend has been going on for more than a month and because I touched on this topic when I wrote about buying physical silver last year. The problem with investing in precious metals, but silver in particular, is a little thing called the Buy-Sell spread. The price you buy is generally higher than spot price. The difference between spot price and your retail purchase price is called the premium. However, when you sell silver, you don’t get that premium back and you usually get 90 ..read more

Greetings my upwardly mobile friends! I’ve been really busy as of late so I never got around to posting the 2020 year end passive income report. Without further ado, here it is: Source Total Passive Income PGX $807.60 PFF $547.84 SCHD $985.33 SPYD $1208.48 VYM $558.30 VTI $15.64 EIRL $6.60 Money Market Interest $101.69 Total $4,231.48 Thats a lot more than the $2,289.84 that I earned in passive income in 2019! The post The 2020 Passive Income Report appeared first on The Upwardly Mobile Life ..read more

Greetings my upwardly mobile friends! Since I joined the personal finance community a couple of years ago, I’ve spent a lot of time researching various investments. While the personal finance community almost universally favors broad based index funds for stocks, a sizable group do advocate investing part of your portfolio in precious metals like silver and gold. I’m always interested in exploring and learning new things so I thought I’d check out precious metals. I did a substantial amount of preliminary research on investing in precious metals and found that a lot of the lingo associated wit ..read more

My landscaping and raised bed gardening posts have been very well received lately so I thought I might indulge everyone with another piece of the picture. In this series, I’m going to document what I’m growing in my raised bed gardens and what I’ll be growing in the raised beds. I hope that a few months from now, I’ll also be able to share pictures of how my plants are progressing and how they turn out. Unfortunately… Unfortunately, it’s winter so my raised garden beds aren’t doing a whole lot other than sitting under some snow. I usually take pictures up close, but it’s cold and I ..read more

Greetings my upwardly mobile friends, As December of 2019 has finally ended, I have all the data for the last quarter of 2019. It was a strong end to the year and we wrapped it up by buying a lot more shares.   Q4 2018 Q4 2019 PFF Dividend $50.76 $104.61 PGX Dividend $99.98 $146.99 SCHD Dividend $27.14 $110.38 SPYD Dividend $54.06 $221.35 VYM Dividend $0.00 $34.00 Money Market Interest $0.00 $56.78 EIRL Dividend $0.00 $2.56 Total Passive Income $231.94 $676.67 Total Holdings At Year End $22,753.41 $97,049.90 The total portfolio sizes are a bit misleading. I added a lot of new capi ..read more

Greetings my upwardly mobile friends! The third quarter of 2019 (July through September) was big for the Passive Income experiment. In fact, it was so big that it warranted shifting from monthly reports to Quarterly Reports. In making this shift, we can capture more data and we don’t discriminate unfairly against those ETFs that provide quarterly dividends as opposed to monthly dividends. In fact, this quarterly format should give us more of an apples to apples comparison between passive income from different sources. without further ado, this is the passive income report for Q3 2019 versu ..read more

This is the second part in a multi part series about building a garden area and growing our own food and flowers. The first part is here. In the first part, we spent months ripping up the old garden tangle that was present and clearing the area for new raised beds. Once the space was cleared for raised beds, I had to actually get raised beds. Before I could buy raised beds, I had to figure out what my garden should look like. I made a few designs but only two were real contenders. I made my designs in a spreadsheet and each box constituted a 1×1 square foot space. Black would be garden ..read more

Nearly a year ago, Mrs. Up and I were shopping for our first house. We had a lot of things we wanted for the home and quite a few we absolutely needed. Most of those things are irrelevant for this post. What was relevant, and what we decided was a need, was a garden. I wanted a big awesome and highly productive garden, and Mrs. Up wanted a very organized garden. It took us all of about a week to realize that we’d probably want some form of raised garden beds to accommodate both of our garden goals. We bought a home with existing garden beds, but they were overgrown weed monsters. Horrib ..read more

Greetings my upwardly mobile friends! July was yet another big month for the Passive Income experiment. July 2018 versus 2019   July 2018 July 2019 Portfolio Value $12,738.62 $58,503.31 PFF Dividend $11.16 $25.59 PGX Dividend $5.95 $50.51 SCHD Dividend $0.00 $74.33 SPYD Dividend $0.00 $0.00 VYM Dividend $0.00 $0.00 Money Market Interest $0.00 $23.84 Total Dividends $17.11 $174.27 The effects of compounding are probably becoming noticeable to all as every month is at or about a record breaker in terms of dividend income. The portfolio is about five times larger than it was in 2018, but th ..read more