Life is getting back to normal after the house move. Time to pick up our investment focus for the different portfolios and read more financial news…
In this weekend edition, the financial newspaper De Tijd headlined “Plan of the Belgian government to make stocks popular again fails !”
The Belgian government has failed to activate savings account money towards stocks investments. Actually the contrary happened. Belgian families sold in 2018 for 919 million euro stock investments and for 2,5 billion euro non-listed shares. At the same time, they parked 10 billion extra on savings accounts.
The government launched in 2018 some new fiscal rules to stimulate stock investments. A small gift towards dividend investors was done in a fiscal gift of 192 euro. (non taxed dividends). In 2019 this dividend gift will increase to 240 euro.
Why do Belgians still park so much money on savings accounts ? Personally I think it’s a combination of things.
First of all, the Belgian government (and all political parties) should take a good look in the mirror and blame themselves. They have increased the dividend tax from 15 to 30$ in the past years. They also introduced a stock transaction tax of 0.35% on the amount of the transaction. That is HIGHER than your broker fee. Insane and stupid. And due to pressure of the party CD&V, they now introduced also a kind of discriminating wealth tax of 0,15% on portfolios higher than 500k.
Secondly I think Belgians lack financial literacy. Past year 2018 I visited different investment fairs in different countries and one thing became clear to me. In Belgium, people are “pushed” towards real estate or funds sold by banks. In other countries I have seen a higher diversity of investments.
The dividend gift s a joke as the Belgian government takes more money than it gives. It is a real shame that there’s so much money available that can’t be activated for useful investments. The road infrastructure is horrible, schools and universities must use old buildings, the government buildings are not environmentally friendly. There’s a huge need for investments and the government with a deficit of 8 billion doesn’t have the means to invest.
So we need an INVESTMENT formula that activates all this money so that investors get a good % return and at the same time society and companies benefit with an added value. Why doesn’t the government look abroad instead of taxing their own citizens more ? Very frustrating to watch all this..
Politicians do have an EXPIRY DATE so I guess that’s why they don’t worry that much. I chose the blog post pic of eating money as the Belgian government has been EATING money in two ways. More taxes while SPENDING more (8 billion deficit) and MORE wasting people’s money by making people store more money on their MONEY wasting savings account. (0,11% of interest rate versus 2,7% inflation rate)
Now let’s see what our March 2019 cashflow was for my mom’s portfolio.
Passive Income in March 2019
During the month of March 2019, we received 132,04$ passive income. Only dividend income.
Here you find the overview of all passive income payouts during the year 2016, 2017,2018 and January 2019.
The Options Trade Review
No options trades this past month.
Passive Income Growth
As you can see in the passive income overview, we do now have 14% of our yearly objective.
The portfolio of my mom has been stable in her 1 Year overview. You can clearly see the December dip.
Going forward
Our First FOCUS is achieving the 290$ per month. We are currently learning about preferred stocks and how we can use those investments for my mom’s portfolio. We have a significant cash position that we want to activate. In the month of April and May we will execute some investments. End of the blogpost.
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Thanks for following us on Twitter and Facebook and reading this blog post. We end with a quote as always.
Source : De Tijd
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