July has kicked off and yesterday we spend all day on airports. I will let you know soon where I am this time. A travel blog post comes soon. If you follow my Twitter feed, you already know.
Saturday we did attend the 6th FIRE meeting in Utrecht in the Netherlands. Another great meeting of bloggers and people who want to learn about investing their money and having their money work for them. FIRE is a term that refers to Financial Independence and Retiring Early. I learned about the concept of FIRE 10 years ago and it was so intriguing to me. I learned about people actually retiring early or becoming financially independent. I thought I’d been prescribed a life where I had to work until I was 67 or much much later paying off debt of others…because the people at that time around me only wanted more stuff and a bigger house…
Once I found out that people were challenging the status quo and living life on their own terms, I got thinking about my future. I changed my course completely, divorced and started the journey of financial independence. I started back from zero. Of course this was not the only reason for divorcing someone but it was definitely 40% of the decision. One day I would love to have total freedom over the work I choose to do and never do things “just for the money.”
That’s why I was surprised when I read the following headline in the financial newspaper De Tijd
The Title says ” Belgians consider investing something for rich people“. The main reason for Belgians not to invest is because they do not have “large amounts of money” to invest with. However the threshold for investing was never that low. A survey of J.P. Morgan Asset Management concluded that the need for financial education is high. The financial literacy of Belgians about investing money is very low. The almost 0% savings account remains very popular en is still for 22% of the Belgians the preferred choice. At the same time 27% of the Belgians worry that inflation will eat their savings account away. Nevertheless only 13%wants to explore an alternative for making more money than their savings account.
The Belgian saver is passive and the main reason is a lack of knowledge. I would dare to say “sometimes lazy”. 43% of the non-investors says ” I don’t have a lot of money to invest” as an excuse. Others (26%) consider the risk too high for losing their money and others (22%) simply admit they do not possess the knowledge. Some people do not want to invest the time (and money) to learn more about it. They rather prefer to consume or “invest” in their house. But will they ever see that money back that they invested in their house?
Investing today has never been simpler. You can find a fund investing plan and invest with 10, 25,..euro per month. This easy way of investing is applied for My Foster Child Portfolio. So “a lot of money” is not required. I would say ” lousy excuse” to the 43% of the Belgians. Investing is extremely important for your (early) retirement. In the Netherlands pensions are no longer increased according to the inflation growth. In France fiscal rules for pensions change. I personally think there won’t be any pension left when I retire…
So let’s move on to our Kids Portfolio. A portfolio I started with 10.000 Euro. We will grow this portfolio as an emergency fund for the kids and as big as possible. We also want to beat Paul D’Hoore the stock market guru from television. Did you see we changed the title ? Did we earn options income ? Find out.
Market Sentiment and Sector Watch
Over the past week we have seen a big shift in sentiment. Last week there were 2 days where the market did sell off heavily. Since 12th of June we do see a sentiment turn and we could go red. We could see lower prices in coming weeks. Markets go through cycles. Of course the potential trade war between USA and China, Europe and other countries is still dominant in the news. You can see this volatility in the following 6 month graph.
Let’s take a look at the Sector Watch. Here we look which sectors we should invest in and what is different compared to last month. We placed the latest Sector Watch graph below…This always you to make you your own analysis.
All Sector ETFs are either in consolidation mode or declining. The strongest sectors remain Technology and Energy. Did you follow the ETF trade in the ticker RUS last time ? The upward trend continued… The energy and oil sector is now in consolidation phase and could see a continued upward trend. Financials get beaten up.
Be aware we are not a financial advisor. Execute your own risk analysis and investment research. Read our disclaimer. We hope this sector review was useful for you to understand market opportunities and how we analyse potential opportunities.
Dividend & Options Income Update
During the month of May 2018, we received 224,68$ passive income. A new record month !! We received 20,78 $ dividend and 203,9 $ options premium. Nice !!
On the 10th of April we sold 3 contracts JNUG at a strike price f 12$. We received 203,90 $ for this.
What was my risk ? If JNUG ended below 12$ in May, I had to purchase 300 shares at a price of 12$.
It never ended under 12$ and I put the money in my kids pockets.
Easy money, isn’t it? Know your risk and manage it…
Portfolio analysis and Growth Strategy
We started with an amount of 10.000 EURO . The 2018 goal for my kids’ portfolio is to generate 1000$ in the total year. We achieved 45% of our yearly goal so far. A big jump forward !
We have 453$ in our pockets so far ! On 10k money that is already after 5 months 4,53%. Not bad isn’t it ? Why are Belgian investors so passive ? Because they do not invest in their knowledge….simple.
Going forward
We keep on investing in our knowledge and learning about other options investing strategies. We will share them once we test them and prove them out. Dividend and options investing (Cash Secured Put strategy) will be the strategy for now to generate more cash flow in this portfolio. Our goal is to set new MONTHLY RECORDS in this portfolio. 203,9$ is now the new ALL TIME HIGH in this portfolio…let’s beat it again going forward !
Good luck with your personal finance strategy for your kids! Thanks for reading.
Putting money on a savings account for your kids is NOT a strategy to make it grow!
We hope you learned something from this blog post and keep on following us on Twitter and Facebook. As always we end with a quote.
Source : De Tijd
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