Last weekend before school starts again. This time we are writing our blogpost from the city of London. Friday evening we started our city break weekend with our son and we did take the Eurostar from Lille, France.
The blog post about this interesting city break weekend follows soon….We use a nice picture from our London visit.
During this visit I told my son about the fact that you don’t have to be an expert about personal finance to get rich.
You don’t need to use fancy economic jargon or know this year’s “hottest stock.” You don’t have to come from an affluent family, and you don’t even have to earn a massive paycheck. For most people, it all boils down to one thing: investing.
“On average, millionaires invest 20% of their household income each year. Their wealth isn’t measured by the amount they make each year, but by how they’ve saved and invested over time,” writes Ramit Sethi in his New York Times bestseller, “I Will Teach You To Be Rich.” CHeck out also the website of I Will Teach You to be Rich
You don’t need to be rich to invest, yet so many of us fail to get started managing our money because we’re intimidated or don’t know where to start. Fear of losing money is also a common concern: “That’s fair,” writes Sethi, “Especially after market losses during the global financial crisis, but you need to take a long-term view. Despite wild rides in the stock market, with a long term perspective, the best thing you can do is start investing early.”
Investing is not as complicated or daunting as we make it out to be. The simplest starting point is to invest in your employer’s 401(k) plan or group insurance plan in Belgium; make sure to take full advantage of your company’s pension plan if they offer one. If you still have money left over and are hungry to continue investing, you can research low-cost index funds, which Warren Buffett recommends. We personally prefer dividend paying ETFs and stocks.
So let’s go towards to our Market Analysis.
Market Analysis
When we analyse the performance of the SPY (screenshot 15 April) we can conclude that we are still in a volatile period and chop fest. look at the red and green candles in April. There is no clear direction of the markets. Last night Western countries US, France and Great Britain decided to bomb Syria. Russia is furious…what will be next?
What is the best investment advice now that the U.S. and its British and French allies have launched targeted military strikes on Syria? Do nothing.
That’s for two reasons. First, you undoubtedly will be too late if you’re selling after seeing headlines that airstrikes are under way, or that Russia has fired back, or worse. Many investment firms have software programs that constantly scour various news feeds for even a mention of such escalation and which immediately begin selling if it detected any. You wouldn’t stand a chance of front-running them.
Second, the stock market’s post-crisis low often represents a good buying opportunity, according to an analysis conducted by Ned Davis Research of the most significant geopolitical crises of the past century. In fact, the firm found, the stock market’s rebound from its post-crisis low is often so powerful that within six months the market is higher than where it stood before that crisis erupted.
Some may argue that it’s tasteless to even be worrying about their portfolio performance when there is the prospect of a major war. Yet the lesson of history is that such worry is not only tasteless but pointless: your portfolio in one year’s time will likely be just where it would have been anyway.
Personally I think we will within the next months test the 260 level again as geopolitical risk has returned in the stock markets. This means we could see lower lows in the month. If this is not the case, we will chop between the 265 and 255 level of the SPY.
Let’s dive in the numbers of my March Dividend & Options Income Report.
Options Income & Dividends received in March 2018
In March 2018 we received a total of 532,32 $ passive income. We received 389,07$ dividend income from monthly paying stocks or ETFs and 143,25$ from quarterly ETFs. No options income this time and this can only be blamed on our broker who blocked trading options on some of our ETFs. This contributed to our decision to leave our broker BINCK. If they want to be a more traditional bank with more service fees and being less customer friendly, fine..that is their decision. But I am gone ! In the coming week we are moving our complete portfolio to the broker Tradersonly.
Below you see the monthly summary overview of the cash flow coming into my bank account.
Portfolio Analysis and Growth
So far we have 2264,63$ passive income for the year 2018. We are behind last year …around 250$ as we received a European bank (BKIA) dividend in March last year. We sold that position later on in the year with a profit. Our monthly dividend income is almost equal if we compare 2017 monthly dividend income compared to 2018 monthly dividend income.
We have 23% of our yearly objective in the books.
The Euro/Dollar trend
We keep on following the EURO/USD valuation. The EUR/USD has been hoovering around the 1,23 level for the past months. No impact on our portfolio.
Going forward
In January 2018 we did set the 10k Challenge ! We have 23% of our challenge in the books after three months. This broker change has thrown us a bit off track but we are upgrading our skills to start with income generating options strategies. We did sell options contracts in my mom’s portfolio and we also did the same in our kids portfolio last week.
Once our portfolio and cash position has been fully transferred to the new broker platform, we are ready to focus hard on implementing the strategies required to achieve our yearly 2018 objective. Our primary goal is to generate consistently cash flow out of the stock market with dividends but ALSO with options ….month after month.
What do you think about our monthly performance ? Did you receive equal cash flow money on your saving account ? Don’t hesitate to leave your comments and feedback. Let us know what you think.
Good luck with your personal finance strategy! Thanks for following us on Twitter and Facebook and reading this blog post. As always we end with a quote.
Sources : Marketwatch
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