Saturday, December 27, 2008

Update

Still upset, still awake...

Can't Sleep

I’ll let the posting time show how late I’m up. Just way too aggravated to sleep right now. The short version is that I’m worked up over what I want to say to my brother the next time he calls. I’m not convinced that he’s willing to drop the issue of me not wanting to go back to school next year. I’d love to do that, but there’s just no way of making it happen. Anyway, I’ve made my choice and I expect it to be respected. I can’t continue to collaborate with someone that I feel will keep questioning my judgement and repeatedly attempt to force a decision on to me.

Monday, December 8, 2008

I think I found a decent hobby I can take up, news satire. I don't expect to displace The Onion or anything, but it seems like a good reason for some chuckles. Anyway, I found myself obsessing again, trying to figure out what to say to my brother. I'll have to admit that it would be nice to go back to school next year, but it'll be even nicer to actually be able to finish school. Obsessing seems to happen a lot to me, I don't think that's healthy. Most of the time, it's about what I want to say to my brother. Maybe it's time to simply declare a break and forbid talking about my future till February or so. Plans look good on paper, though I still have to live through a few years of working there, and even more painfully, watch as a few more years of my life slip by.

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Stressed

There's nothing bothering me right now. I'm calm. There's nothing on my immediate horizon. Yet I feel stressed. I don't want to go to sleep, even though I really should. I'd like to know why. Maybe I just don't want to face tomorrow. It's something I hope to fix, but I don't know how to go about it. I think it's depression related though.

New in 2009

There maybe times when it's premature to plan for the future, like I wouldn't start planning for 2050 now, but it's never too early to dream. There's still a lot of unknowns though I'd like to conjure up some vision of what I feel 2009 might be like.
I'm going to make it a goal to record and categorize my spending. Hopefully put together a summary on the last weekend of every month. I don't spend on days that I work, so that should do for the month. Recording and categorizing for my income too.
I'd like to get my brother off my back about going back to school when he things I should and focus on when preparations are going to be ready. There's no real plan for doing this.
Some decision needs to be made about how much contact I want to maintain. Right now, I think what we had earlier with him calling and me deciding not to answer might be the best solution for the time being. I don't really expect to need these decisions finalized till I move away.
I think I'd like to end the year with a net worth of 50K or more. I suppose this means that my goals are rather distant at this point.
Do I see myself getting a new computer? I'm not sure. I've put it off this long already. I think the thing that'll push it for me is when my monitor finally dies. I'm certainly getting my money's worth out of that used laptop I bought so many years ago.
I see myself going to a wedding in the USA around November. That's going to be my big budget thing this year. I'm kind of already preparing for that, I started the first steps in opening a new bank account at citizens bank. They have no fee US debit. Also starting a savings account there. As of the last adjustment that Canadian tire made to their interest rates, they have a better rate. Granted, that might only last a week or so. Part of me is tempted create an array of savings accounts at several different places, but I think I have enough as it is. I wonder if it'll be necessary to link that to everything else and make it a hub as well or if I can keep it as a branch. Now I'm tempted to create a web diagram showing how all my accounts are linked. It'll probably look more complicated than it actually is. When everything is linked to everything else, money can simply move directly instead of hopping through an intermediary.
Not sure what else to say about next year yet. It's simply going to be more of the same for about half a year or so.

Saturday, December 6, 2008

Feeling more depressed

It's not the holidays that's depressing me, it's the milestones. Two and a half years into what I've started calling the lost decade. My brother is insisting that I go back to school and telling me that nothing will change if I save up money instead of needing to ask for it every year. He also doesn't remember all the times everyone freaked out about stuff going wrong and kept me from taking care of it. Then there's the invasive probing and circular arguements that we had about money the first time I was going to school. Personally, I think the best thing to do is to avoid those probelms, which he can't seem to recall.
There's no good reason for him to really remember anyway, those were events in my life, not his. I don't know who he was playing in those big out of town hockey tournements he played in or how his team placed, but I wager that he does. His life, not mine.
Right now, waiting two years feels like a great idea. I can be away, I can avoid needing to ask for money, I can sustain myself for a while afterwards if I don't get a job right away. Also, on the external side, investments are cheap right now and the supply of students is high.

Monday, December 1, 2008

Depressed again

It's times like this that I wonder why I'm doing all this. When it starts getting rough, I start questioning things even more. I can't help feeling like I'm hiding from something or that I'm in denial right now. Nothing seems to feel right. I don't know why I'm still there besides the logic of the situation making sense. Anyway, feeling drained and seems like I didn't really miss out on much in the markets. Gone from good deals to wild again in one day. Hard to make decisions with swings like that.

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Things I'm putting off

I'm putting off spending money on a lot of things, some of them more important than others.
New sweat pants
A cloak or parts to make one
Auxiliary camera
Shoes
Steel toed boots
New monitor

Not sure what else I want. For now, I have sweat pants. The waist is worn on one pair and there's a few rips around the ankles of another pair and I have one good pair. I'm expecting that I might want to wear a pair under my other pants when it gets colder.
When it gets colder is what I want a cloak for too. In a moment of eccentricity it dawned on me that I only need my arms out for locking the door and pulling out my bus pass in the winter. I also want to keep my arms closer to my body and preferable under an insulating layer with everything else. Why not shelter my arms from the wind. I haven't quite figured out how to hold it shut yet, or what sort of design to use. Right now I'm thinking of a simple rectangular pattern with a throw blanket, a utility blanket, polytarp and some outer layer for the sake of I don't really want to be going around looking like I'm wearing a tarp.
I'll skip to shoes since it's simple. I've been wearing the same shoes for a long time. They're worn, but still working.
Steel-toed boots simply need to be kept in good condition to be safe. There's a bit of steel showing in mine now. I'm not going to gamble with it, but I'll keep running with them for now, wait till they get a bit more worn.
My monitor is also breaking. From time to time the image will flicker. The image also dies from time to time. Probably going to switch to LCD when it breaks. There's plenty of computers around here anyway so loosing that one isn't much of a burden for me. I can wait a while to get it going again.
I'd like a camera that I can carry around anywhere without worry. Right now, I don't really want to damage my camera. Probably something cheap, a toy camera. There've been two things that I've been looking at, key chain cameras and a wonky waterproof vga camera. Off hand, I'm leaning towards the waterproof. It'll survive where I take it, such as into the dusty factory that I work at. There's no preview screen on it though. Keychain sized cameras have a certain appeal to them too. There's a plethora of other things to choose from too. I suppose ideally, I'd go for something that feels hardened, has a preview screen, and external memory. The last one is the hard one to find. It used to be that preview screens were hard to find on very-low-end cameras but external memory wasn't that scarce. I know I'm not going to find something with everything that I'm looking for. Maybe I'll actually decide to buy something and try it out sometime. Wanted something like this for quite some time now.

Arg, not another fitness tax credit

http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/comment/story.html?id=ff39a14d-2241-4507-93be-22a344e232a3
A $500 tax credit for organised fitness? This is annoying. I hate bad legislation. It leaves big gaping holes such as why people in construction don't get a tax break automatically since they're undeniably significantly more active than the typical office dweller. Then there's people who walk/cycle/some other physically active mode of transportation to work. Further more, I don't think they'll let people deduct things like my zoo pass, obviously I'm physically propelling myself around the zoo myself when I go. My camera has also been a great tool for keeping active, I go places to take pictures. Something that doesn't apply to me though, dog expenses need to be in there too since they have to be walked regularly. Cats shouldn't qualify.
Besides the scope, the amount also annoys me. It's worth about $50. That's a small amount. Personally, I don't feel that will really be worth the overhead. The government doesn't need to give everyone a pat on the head for doing things that they should be doing anyway. Nobody seems to suggest that there should be a symbolic pat on the head for people who can cook for themselves, switch to winter tires when it snows, brush their teeth regularly, or be able to name all the provinces, territories and their respective capitals. Surely all those things add a lot of value to our society as well.
If anything deserves a tax break, lets give a tax break for people who keep a reasonable amount of money in readily accessible cash/cash equivalents. It'll reduce the usage and thus cost of our social service net significantly. Furthermore, I expect that the number of people overburdened with debt will go down and there'll be a reduction in bankruptcies. It's also a good smart thing to do. Of course I know there'll be down sides and the down side to this is that a certain portion of the population will stop trying to calculate what should be an appropriate emergency fund for themselves. Just as there's people now who assume that they don't need one because there's social services and people who assume that simply having a home is enough for retirement or contribute only up to the employer matched portion to their rrsp and don't even know what their money is invested in.

Friday, November 28, 2008

Markets

First Friday off in some time. It was nice being able to watch the markets again and boy did they put on a nice show. I gained more than two weeks of pay in today's trading session. Unfortunately, since I didn't know that I was going to have today off, I wasn't able to get any more money in. For some reason, I'm not fond of placing orders when I can't watch them. Anyway, I don't particularly have a plan for where I want to position money right now. Everything has been bouncing around so much, it's hard to tell what is a good deal right now. I'm told that this past week the tsx was up 11%, today makes it 17%. I wonder if that means that I can declare the last slump over.
Three options were tempting me lately
1) buy everything. The whole index was heavily discounted and it was hard to tell what was going to be a better deal at the time. I like index funds, so why not jump in heavy?
2) focus on financials. I watch the financials closely since I have the feeling that they're probably battered more than anything else. Whether or not that actually true or just a perception, I'm not sure.
3) Follow the original REIT plan. I still think that's probably a good approach to achieving my short term investment goals, which may or may not need to be redefined. Personally, I think the valuations have been tossed around enough that they should be re-evaluated and I should come up with a new allocation plan. I'm considering a simple equal-weight portfolio of a few favorites. My quirky index is down roughly 39%, compared to 32% for the tsx REIT index.
Anyway, got too much cash piling up, I want to get more money into the market sometime.

On another note, there's also the credit markets. The big BCE buy out deal fell through and I'm kind of half celebrating that. I'm not sure what ramifications it has for everyone right now. Somehow I don't think that the across the board drop in mortgage rates follow the fall through is entirely co-incidence though. Dropping that deal frees up a lot of credit that can be used by other people. There no telling what people would have done with money they got from the BCE buy out though. I'm sure some market would have been given a boost by that money, be it the real goods, equities, debt, commodities. Maybe this is one of those zero sum net gain moves.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Royal Bank Earnings Pre-Release

I suppose there's one more thing I can talk about, Royal Bank's earnings are down 15%. Relative to other financial institutions I hear about, it's pretty darn good to still be turning a profit. It makes me wonder what sort of p/e the tsx is really trading at once the updated figures are in. According to TMX money's site, the composite is at 9.9 right now. If earnings drop 15% across the board, we'd be at 11.6. Adds a bit of suspense to an already tense situation.

I feel terrible

Sore all over and it's as if m body is coming apart again. I don't know what's been wearing me down. Anyway, thus far it looks like the possibility of overtime is over for now. Last week there was only one overtime shift. Rumour has it that maybe they stopped offering overtime to nights because of low production with their mishmash of whoever they can get crew. It also seemed like we may have been starting to catch up with the schedule today. Granted, running out of material happens when we're behind schedule too. The real cause isn't a lack of orders but rather the sheer number of unknowns when it comes to production speed. We could have good days while the process before us has bad days, or the other way around. I also overheard some people talking about how one person was sick for a week and another person was in for a half hour and decided to walk off.
Wish I could blab about something other than work right now, but I am sore and tired.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Taking things surprisingly well

Ok, I have this big stuffed animal, about two and a half feet, and I tried to wash it, didn't dry it quick enough. Washed it again, again wasn't dry quick enough and now on top of that it's burnt too. I'm surprised I haven't gotten into a mad rage yet. I've had that thing for well over a decade now. Very attached to it.

Fiscal Stimulus

Blown a lot of money lately on a bunch of things. I’m sure for most people it isn’t anything to really notice, for me though it’s still quite a bit of money. Most of it went towards making sure I’m properly equipped, the rest for food and fun. The food was not really an out of the ordinary expense though. Also, didn’t go out and get the silly gold ratchets. A brief summary of things I’ve bought lately
$2 Toque
$3 Gloves
$10 Jeans
$10 Jeans
$27 Winter boots
$2 Headphones
$2 Book
$10 Katamari Damacy
Kind of scary when that's considered a lot for me.
Some things I needed, others I probably could have put off a bit longer before getting, and a few items in there I didn’t need but well worth it. Can’t wait to see my credit card statement, specially since I found out that the phone call I made with it while trying to meet people at the airport for the funeral actually cost me $12 for a local call.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Terrified

What am I scared of? Well, the TSX is at a four year low, but that's not what I'm concerned about. I'm worried about myself. I've been depressed so long and it really has me worried that I'm not behaving rationally, or that I'll suddenly snap and do something irrational one day. Part of me feels like I'm playing with a delicate balance right now and having confidence in being able to handle it is usually a warning that things are not right.
Anyway, I decided that I'd treat myself to try to cheer me up. Thought of going out for a burger but during the several hours I spent thinking about it, I realized that for the price of a burger, fries and a drink I could get 2-3lbs of drumsticks. So, gonna cook some drumsticks and have some fun on Friday. If only I could decide how to cook them.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Auto Bailouts?

The beauty of market mechanisms is that they weed out bad approaches and promote good ones automatically. Weaker firms are eliminated while better business models succeed. A strange question arises when all the firms doing a particular task fail at the same time. All the major auto makes in north america seem to be doing just that. It's going to be interesting see what might arise from that. A quirky mix of niche cars, and heavy equipment manufacturing and consumer cars coming largely from overseas firms. Is this a case where we'll be better off interviening? Anyone with a background in economics want to share their more educated opinion on helping out the auto industry?
I suppose in the bigger picture, as long as there's still cars being produced and we can still trade something to get them, there's no doom. Though there'll be chaos as the economy tries to deal with the collapse of a major sector and consumers find their way to other names. Then again, after a chat with a few people from other parts of the world, I'm left with the impression that the auto sector in all developed nations is in ruins.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Mismerized

Usually, I don't spend money on silly things, but right now a set of gold plated ratchets has my eye. There's actually very little gold on them, so they're not expensive but they still look so pretty. My dad had one, a limited edition one and I thought it was pretty cool. Very tempted to go get a set. $9 for a 1/4, $10 for 3/8 and $13 for 1/2. I want a full set. Heh, at those prices I kind of question their quality, though I don't intend to actually use them. I guess I'll just see if there's anything left by the time I get there since I don't really see myself going to the far ends of the city when I'm working.

Contrasting Strategies

I have two investing books in my room here. Neither of them are recent. One of them is from the 90s by Gordon Pape, the other one is from the 80s by VanCaspel. Two very different times and two very different approaches. My memories of the 80s are largely that of cartoons and elementary school and to me, the 90s were about Jr high, and high school. My focus wasn't on economics at the time. Anyway, from the data that I could obtain, the 80s were an inflation dominated era. Interest rates were soaring to combat that. The 90s were the lead up to the bursting of the telecom bubble. Bre-x minerals was a big thing. Interest rates were dropping as inflation was brought under control.
The two of them have some very contrasting approaches and I think it's partly due to the situations at the time of writing, but their advice does have a certain timeless element to it. VanCaspel's advice was to take up equity stakes, ignore bonds, and pick good mutual funds that outperforms indexes. Interestingly enough, mutual funds seldom outperformed indexes then, but some did. Now I can't seem to find any that have consistently outperformed indexes. Anyway, that aside, I think the expectation back then was that inflation was here to stay.
Gordon Pape on the other hand recommends holding a balanced portfolio at all times. He talks of making good returns on bonds during times of falling interest rates. Strip bonds were one of the things that he talked about too. I'm told that they tend to have less price stability than interest paying bonds. That is the selling point for strip bonds though, larger price swings mean higher capital gains. Also higher losses when things go wrong too. Granted, a big miss there should mean good times for something else.
There are some compelling arguments for either approach. In the end though, I think I'd have to side with Sun Tsu's timeless advice about trying to prepare for potential losses. We must not count on the enemy not attacking but instead on our ability to receive him. Applied to this situation, it means running with a balanced portfolio. When things go wrong, it isn't as bad.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

market dip over?

Has the overshoot ended? Is this the next support level for the indexes? I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if things stayed around this level for a while. Granted, the only outcome that would really surprise me at this point is if stocks were to go on a sudden week long surge upwards. Sadly, I didn't get the chance to put any new money into the markets. I should be getting my money back out of the family holding firm by the end of the year though. Kind of disappointed that all my resources were tied up and I was unable to act. If it wasn't, I'd at least be able to question whether or not I did the right thing and learn a bit more about my temperment.
I did learn a different interesting thing though, the more money I build up, the more attractive broad index funds look instead of picking one or two favorite stocks at the moment. For the moment, I'm still trying to figure out how I want to position my money next. A lot of attractive looking options out there, but I wonder if it's being bold or foolish. Only time will tell.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

The Day Before I Leave

I've been in the USA regularly for long enough to want a solution to avoiding carrying large amounts of cash every time I travel. This morning, I found an ad for Citizen's Bank that's offering just what I need. Whoo, no debit fees for Canada and the USA, and no atm fees on their end. Of course, now is a little late for opening an account before I travel.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Crisis

Amidst all the chaos, I happen to have a non-financial crisis in my life. I lost my father, some time before that, I lost a great aunt, just earlier I lost an uncle, and someone who probably would have become an in-law is just about through. There's a dramatic spike in fatalities in my personal life. I'm not sure what to make of this other than, I'll probably see a good stretch of everyone being ok for a while afterwards. At least I hope so.
I'm dashing off for a funeral this week and I am completely torn apart from work, taxes and trying to straighten out accounts. Would love to comment on this week's market activities but I'm tired.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

No More Inheritance?

Personally, I believe that there are lines that once crossed are hard to return from. I've been on the other side of more than one of them myself. My mom has some built up resentment and she feels like lashing out and well, external validation of her claim is important to her so I don't think I'll step in the way.
There isn't really much of use to me in the estate anyway. Assets are locked up and hard to do stuff with. I'm estimating that under the will I'd get roughly $130k, of which $30K is actually liquid. $100K is locked up in the family holding firm in one way or another. I wasn't really counting on it, but I was looking forward to it. To a certain extent, I don't really want to be tied down by a business right now. I need to be able to take off and just be for a while.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Alternative visualizations

Goals are only good if they’re well defined. They key to doing any big task is to break it down into small manageable parts. Old clichés but well, I felt the need to do something innovative. My goal right now is essentially to get up to the point where I don’t need to work to make ends meet, which I’ve roughly defined as being half of minimum wage. Though I really would feel a lot better with full minimum wage. Anyway, 52 weeks in a year, 26 letters in the alphabet. I think I’ll visualize my goal as being the letters of the alphabet. Each one being worth one week of minimum wage earnings per year, or about $8.40/hr x 40hr/week = $336. The important part is the beginning, so I’ll put the capital letters there.
I’m nowhere near as far along as I would like to be in my goal. For now I’ll use the excuse of most of my resources are tied up in a bridge loan to bail out the family holding firm. For now, I express my progress as being 2 weeks or visually as
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Thursday, October 16, 2008

I want a play fort!

A silly post today. Maybe it's the temperature, or maybe I seek more security in this time of economic uncertainty but right now, I have this strange desire to build a play fort to curl up in when I sleep. It gets harder to find appropriate fort building items as you get bigger. Maybe I should rectify that when I get my own place.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

To Do List

Well, I could talk about the election or I can talk about the bank bail outs. I think I've already beaten the market rebound to death. Though right now, I'm feeling tired, so I'll talk about that. I'm setting a new goal, and that is to try to reduce the anxiety that I feel when I'm about to go to sleep. It always feels like I didn't get enough done or I have something looming on my mind. I'm told writing it down helps, so here goes.
Tomorrow, I need to make a phone call regarding the accounts of the family holding firm, get some money transferred so that the bills can be paid and because GST need to be paid at the end of the month. I've already phoned once this month, I hope things are underway already but this is already late enough to make me uncomfortable.
The day after, I need to buy a phone card.
That pretty much sums it up. I hope this helps clear my mind.

Monday, October 13, 2008

DOW up 11%

I've probably beaten this issue to death already but if you had left the market completely on Friday doing all your trades at the end of the session and ignored today, you'd have missed out on a bit 11% increase. The actual mechanics of doing that only really works with a really small portfolio though.

Declaring Victory

I'll declare an early victory here. Canadian Markets are closed, but the DOW, S&P500 and NASDAQ are all up over 6% right now. One of the best days of the year, and when did it happen? After what'll hopefully be the worst decline of the year. Or at least I hope there isn't a bigger one. I like that everything is cheaper now, but I'm kind of worried about unemployment and economic collapse.
Also, this hardly makes up for the losses, but who knows maybe the markets will surge another 12% before closing, or shoot upwards for the rest of the week. Anyway, those one day blips are little more than curiosities.

Friday, October 10, 2008

A Handful of Days

"Recently, a group called Dimensional Funds studied the performance of the S&P 500 from January 1970 to December 2006, during which time the annualized return of the market was 11.1%. They also noted something amazing: Of those 36 years from 1970 to 1986, if you missed the 25 days when the stock market performed the best, your return would have dropped from 11.1% to 7.6%, a crippling difference.

Now, if only we could know the best investing days ahead of time.
"
I keep running into this quote, verbatim including the 36 years from 1970 to 1986, which is actually a 16 year time frame, so I assume they mean 2006. I also assume that it's no longer recent, after all who would do a study that abruptly stops at the most significant economic event in recent history. Anyway, I suspect that there's a touch of insanity and twisting of the facts at work here. I'm not going to study 36 years, but I have kind of noticed something about the best investing days and I think we're missing something very important here.
Year to date, there have been four days when the TSX went up more than 400 points. Those four days amount to a total of 2371.58 points. That's a very impressive sum. Even if you compare it to the peak of 15073.13, which happened on June 18, 2008 instead of today's close of 9600.18 it is still impressive.
I put forth the assertion that yes we do know when these days are but no, it doesn't make all that huge of a difference.

And for another good quote, "Please excuse the crudity of this model, I didn't have time to build it to scale or to paint it." Shown here are the best four investing days of the Toronto Stock Exchange in the year thus far. When do they occur? They occur during downward trends when the "Gee, things are getting cheap" people are joined by the "Wait a sec, we're really over reacting" group. One and four are perhaps the best examples of this due to my arbitrary cropping. I'll take a wild stab in the dark and assume that over the last 36 years the very best of the best have also happened like this. My hypothesis is partially based on the largest of the bit ones in my ever so limited time frame study, #3 at 848pts, is huge compared to all the day to day movements I can remember. Unless you're an ultra agile day trader who can move a fortune in minutes, you realistically can't avoid the best trading days. So if you were to miss them, maybe you'd be out of the market for at least a week. You also wouldn't be back in the very next day. In addition to missing the best day, you'd miss a huge drop and a bit of the settling down afterwards (and I regret not leaving enough to show whether that was generally upwards or downwards). Counter-intuitively, you'd probably get a better return trying to miss the best days rather than moving money into the market in anticipation of the best days.
Of course, this being the end of one of the worst weeks that I can recall, I'll have to say that maybe if we focused on a longer time period like months or years, this would have some meaning.
To toss one more thing out there, one of my other observations about the market is that the intraday swings can be quite powerful as well. If we did a study on cutting the best one hour stretches of trading from an index's multi-decade return I'm sure it would have some ridiculously disproportional impact as well and people would be quoting it out of context and talking about it as if it held some profound meaning.

Are the Indexes Cheap Again?

Prices have declined considerably lately. Though what has been declining faster? Personally, I questioned whether or not energy and material prices would really stay high. When there was a big run up, they started occupying a larger portion of the indexes. The more you pay for stuff you don't particularly want, the more expensive the indexes are. If I were interested in oil, I suppose the indexes have become more expensive lately, though for what I'm interested in, it seems that buying index funds might make sense now. Dividend yields are also getting higher. Question is, what are earnings like?
I've tentatively decided to wait until the next quarter to make investment decisions, it's amazing how much things have changed since I last sat down and did some brain storming. That as only a few weeks ago too.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Irony

On my way home today, I had a very interesting thought. One of the things causing economic chaos these days is the collapse of banks, uncertainty of credit and dangerous balance sheets. Interestingly, the way out of this economic slow down might not necessarily be to spend money. If we saved money instead, there'd be deposits, deposits would be stable and reliable and thus lendable. Funds that banks feel comfortable lending out would then free up the credit market and spur spending again. Then everything keeps chugging along.
I'm sure the spending part is important too, but we already have a lot of loans on the books.

Monday, October 6, 2008

$514.70

I couldn't think of a good title for this post, but I was reading earlier that the average canadian has $514.70 left in their primary transaction account after all the bills are paid. How do I stack up? Frankly, I try to keep that under $10. Though in all practical sense, predicting my expenses with the accuracy to run with $500 less than average in my primary transaction account is worth about $15/year. Somehow it doesn't quite seem worth it. Then again, in my life what might happen to me? The car I don't own could get a flat tire and need replacement. Hmm, my computer could die and I'd have to patiently wait and plan the purchase of a new one. Umm, I could get sick and need medicine which I'll have to put on my credit card and move money out of my savings account to pay for. Maybe I'll think of something.
In other news, I'm once again rethinking my investment plans. Since September 23rd, my hypothetical portfolio of reits is down 16.34%, compared to 15.06% for the reit index I'd like to beat. Though I did out perform the TSX, which fell 18.37% in the same time period. The venture exchange has dropped almost that much in the past two days. The Dow though did a 8.28% drop, which is considerably better. The correlation data is valuable, though the current allocations no longer reflect the amount of money I anticipate I'll be able to invest. Granted there's still a heck of a lot of time for them to bounce around. Meh, it's completely hypotheical for now anyway. I'll defer decisions for when resources free up again.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Overtime?

Well, fun time is over again. Question on my mind is whether or not I want to do overtime this week. I think what I need is a good long stretch of not doing overtime and get things back to where getting through the week isn't nearly the challenge it is now. Granted, there isn't going to be much overtime left, also weighing in on this is that it's a four day weekend.

There's Signal In The Noise

Ok, so maybe adding some factor for the income breakdown of a reit wasn't a good idea after all. I quickly discovered that for many reits, those don't stay very consistent year after year. They actually bounce around quite a bit. There's probably still some useful measure in there, but it seems like there's far more noise than signal. I wonder what else I might be able to consider for a mkII reit index.

Friday, October 3, 2008

Adding an Additional Consideration to my Indexing

During one of my many dull moments at work, I realized that there was another factor that I could easily add to my indexing, other taxable income. In general, distributions are split between capital gains, return of capital and other taxable income. As much as tax rates are higher, marginal rates, for other taxable income, compared to half of marginal for capital gains, I want to see other taxable income. If you don't have more taxable income than your depreciation, then you're not doing a good job of recuperating your capital costs. Question of the day is how do I want to scale this one. Maybe I want to increase the weighting of growth as well since price volatility seems to throw yield around wildly and growth provides a measure of long term stability as well.

Monday, September 29, 2008

Still Sliding

Does this count as two market blips or just one with a breather in the middle? It looks like it'll be a while before I can really do a comparison of market drops for the year. There sure have been a lot of them.
It looks like pretty much everything is down across the board. Since I tossed together my own index and seeded it with values from sept 23, it's down 6.01%, the s&p tsx capped reit index is down 5.95%, so I'm not doing any better, though it's only been a few trading days, and both those are ignoring yield. Not that it really means anything right now other than I seem to be matching the day to day market fluctuations. No clue if I'll do better in the long run, though off hand, I have better yield by 0.9%. Though that doesn't matter either since I can easily be out grown 0.9%. It's tempting to update my spreadsheet and see if there's a better way I can allocate the cash I'm assuming I can save up by the end of next year. Who knows, maybe this will actually wind up being more than a recreational exercise.
Also reminds me that I haven't written down anything about how I decided on actual share amounts. Maybe I should decide on a methodology for how I'm going to use the data to actually go about investing. Though that'll have to wait for another night. Late and tired, and being depressed doesn't help either.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

March grinds to a halt

I think that's the end of my overtime. It's time to get ready for work again and I am completely drained. Definitely one of the hazards of working too much. I don't know if one week will be enough to get me back at it again, but there's also a holiday coming up this month and I have to file GST. I think that does it for my overtime this year.
So close to the end too, but I can't ignore my limitations.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Reflections on MK1 REIT Index

I wonder what a table looks like if I just paste it in here?
Value Growth sum
name price current distribution current yield 2008 2007 2006 2005 average Quintiles
allied properties 19.1 1.32 6.91% 4.76% 2.94% 3.76% 3.47% 3.74% 10.65% 3
artis 14.28 1.08 7.56% 2.27% 0.00% 0.57% 0.57% 0.85% 8.42% 2
boardwalk 34.05 1.8 5.29% 12.53% 8.11% 17.43% 1.94% 10.00% 15.29% 5
canadian apartment properties 16.2 1.08 6.67% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 6.67% 1
crombie 10.65 0.8904 8.36% 4.51% 4.41% 1.49% 3.47% 11.83% 4
cominar 21.13 1.44 6.81% 6.19% 10.78% 2.00% 0.00% 4.74% 11.56% 4
calloway 19.15 1.548 8.08% 0.00% 3.20% 3.48% 15.05% 5.43% 13.51% 5
dundee 30.1 2.196 7.30% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 7.30% 2
huntingdon 1.27 0.2796 22.02% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 22.02% 5
H&R 14.87 1.44 9.68% 5.08% 2.70% 2.30% 4.82% 3.72% 13.41% 5
interrent 2.15 0.2604 12.11% -31.55% -31.55% -19.43% 1
lanesborough 5.2 0.564 10.85% 0.00% 0.00% 0.64% 0.00% 0.16% 11.01% 4
morguard 12.15 0.9 7.41% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 7.41% 2
norther properties 23 1.4796 6.43% 0.00% 7.22% 5.50% 4.61% 4.33% 10.77% 3
primaris 16.26 1.2192 7.50% 3.67% 3.16% 0.00% 5.56% 3.10% 10.59% 3
canadian realestate investment trust 28.15 1.3596 4.83% 2.26% 2.59% 1.22% 1.62% 1.92% 6.75% 1
riocan 20.16 1.35 6.70% 0.00% 2.27% 2.33% 2.38% 1.74% 8.44% 2
retrocom 3.5 0.45 12.86% -25.00% 0.00% -26.79% -20.02% -17.95% -5.10% 1
scotts 5.92 0.8496 14.35% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 14.35% 5
whiterock 9.51 1.122 11.80% -0.53% 0.00% 0.86% 0.00% 0.08% 11.88% 4

That's messy to the point of nonsensical. If you can somehow comprehend it, what's interesting about this? To start with my top picks on this method are Boardwalk, Calloway, Huntingdon, H&R, and Scott's. Three of those, I'm ok with. Boardwalk has show good growth and I know they're a big player where residential real estate is concerned. H&R is number two by market cap, so obviously a lot of other people feel that it's worth putting a lot of money into. Calloway as I recall is Walmart's largest landlord in Canada. Very solid anchor tenant. Huntingdon is one that I don't feel comfortable holding a major position in. It scores high on yield, but that's because investors are fleeing. That's something my methodology doesn't work well on, so some tweaking is to be required. I can manually ax it from the list, though that leaves me wondering what to do with H&R, which has taken a considerable slide lately ever since the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
The last name on there is one that I think I like. Scott's, while having a high yield, looks actually stable. It's down considerably from 12 months ago, but it spent the past 5 months hovering around $6. We're in the middle of a major dip in the markets and it is still around $6. There was also a big dip in July, it held steady at around $6. So unlike huntingdon, this doesn't appear to be the result of a distress sale. Latest headlines say that they're making acquisitions and their Q2 earnings report says revenue is up 23% and payout ratio is improving. This might actually be a good name to run with, as the methodology suggests. Granted, they have yet to increase distributions since starting.
In the next tier of stuff, there's Crombie, Cominar, Lanesborough and Whiterock. Four names I don't hear much about. Half of them have shown some growth, the other half hasn't. This raises the question of whether or not all of these are stable/growing. I'll just assume the growing ones are actually growing and cut down the amount of work I need to do. This of course brings to mind another question, if I need to look into almost every company in the list, why bother indexing? Isn't indexing supposed to make things easier? Well, I need to know that my methodology works.
When I look into lanesborough, the first headline on their website is that they're back in the black, which is a cause for concern for me. I like to know why they were loosing money. I also know nothing about what they do, but why they're loosing money has yanked my attention first. The news release claims that a large percentage of their properties are under construction or under lease. A closer look reveals that yes, there are properties that are under construction and some with some very low occupancy rates. It also shows that revenues are increasing quickly. I also see that they're paying out more in distributions than their fund flow from operations. This troubles me. For now, I'm just going to wait and see what happens with it. When converting from play money to real money, this will probably be one of the last ones I buy.
So, what about whiterock? According to the fact sheet on their website, FFO surpassed the distribution rate sometime in Q4 last year. They're landlords to a lot of government offices. Also claim to be making accretive acquisitions and they have access to credit with TD. It's nice having a quick sheet to look at that doesn't force me to wade through financial statements that I still find somewhat cryptic. Though I am looking at them anyway and while I don't feel confident in my ability to read them, things seem decent. I'm hesitant to say they look good, but mainly due to I'm still not entirely convinced I'm fully understanding everything.
Since time is precious, for now I'll refrain from looking up every other name on the list. It's not real money anyway and I can look into things further when I actually have the money to invest.
Another interesting thing to note, Riocan is actually near the bottom of the heap, which I'm not sure I'm ok with. If I had to guess why, I'd assume it's because it's considered a safer place and fewer people have decided to sell off their holdings. Thus it isn't as good of a deal as other reits right now, however remains a high quality investment. Of course, this is all just the uneducated speculation of a first time investor.
Of course, there's still one more next step, translating percentages into actual lots of units. I don't really like the idea of having a lot of odd lots of everything. After that, there's the saving up of money followed by the actual buying of stuff.

Friday, September 26, 2008

Playing with My Own Index

I decided to make my own REIT index since it seems like a good way to get some more income and I wasn't really happy with my current options in that sector. The iShares ETF tracking the S&P TSX REIT index gets a lot of talk for a lot of things. One is for having very few securities, 12 reits and t-bills. The other is for having roughly 25% of it's funds in Riocan and what used to be about 15% in H&R, or about 40% in two securities. Granted, it's not the number of ticker symbols you have in your fund, it's really about what they represent. I can justify having a large position in Riocan simply because it's hard for me to think of a place I lived where they didn't have a very nice looking property nearby and they were always pretty much fully rented out. H&R is also another big name, though they don't proudly post their name on every property they own. In terms of spreading investment dollars amoungst sqft, the two of them do a fairly good job.
One critism that I don't hear all that often is that its holdings aren't adjusted to remove what may not be considered REITs anymore after the big "let's kill off the income trusts" tax change. There's some worry going on over whether or not things like senior's housing and hotels where much of the money comes from the services provided as opposed to the lending of the property. I would like to stick to what is definately going to still be considered a REIT afterwards and still an income trust/mutual fund investment trust.
So, why build my own index? Well, I'm not going to deny that fun is one of the reasons. Also, while those two REITs might spread money over large amounts of rental area, they do not spread money around different management styles, and acquisition philosophies. They're also still only two ticker symbols, so I should be able to reduce volitility with a larger basket. Granted in the bigger picture it's like saying that you don't feel the waves as much, but you're still stuck in the current. So in hopes of getting better returns, I started going about deciding how I'll setup my indext.
XRE is based off an index that uses market share weighting. I am interested in returns and it tends to be a bit of a pain to calculate total returns. Complexity is not something that I'm interested in, keeping things simple is one of the general philosophies of indexing. I decided on a simple scoring process involving yield plus a four year average growth rate. The general idea being if I had a two percent higher yield, I can simply reinvest the difference and wind up with two percent better growth rate, so the two are really interchangable, at least in a taxless world. Four years was kind of an arbitrary decision. The current year is included and counts as a full year even though it's not over, this advantages reits that don't wait till the end of the year to adjust distributions. It's a fudge I'm ok living with. Also many REITs are less than four years old. So I did a simple average of whatever the distribution growth rate was over the age of the REIT. Notably absent is any capital appreciation. I'm less concerned about capital appreciation than I am income. So I now have a MK1 Return Rated REIT index.
It's also getting late, so I'll stop now and leave this post nicely about what I did and follow up tomorrow with a post on what my spreadsheet suggests I do.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Market Dips Year to Date

Heh, I was plotting a post about how different sectors performed in the various market drops so far. Though after looking at today's closing market figures and I must say this one isn't over yet. While I haven't really looked at the data yet, but I think there's been a change. I'll see what I find when it's over.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Here we go again

One of the things I absolutely hate about elections is the promise of tax credits and deductions. The previous government brought in quite a few and I'm already hearing a lot of praise for a credit for closing costs for first time home buyers. There are already enough of them. I want simpler taxes across the board for everyone.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Real-estate risk/Random speculation

What do you get when you combine lack of experience with a lack of formal background into the subject?  Well, I'm not sure, though some thoughts going through my mind since I originally decided that I like REITs and would like to have a significant portion of my portfolio in them.  I can see the damend for office space dropping as financial services shrink.  This will probably result the price of office heavy REITs falling/yield increasing, along with slower growth rates and possibly a small decrease in distributions in the short term.  Part of me expects that things will become oversold and open up opertunities to invest.
I can't really see industrial property moving very quickly.  Yeah, we're loosing car plants, which means that all the connected stuff is going to suffer a bit.  I'm tempted to whimsically remark that all the parts for anything these days come out of China anyway so it'll stay contained.  In all practicality though, it's a bit of a toss up in my mind over whether or not closures will out pace exsisting escallation clauses in the continued leases.
Retail, I have a hard time seeing a decline in high quality retail properties, however, I don't think they'll grow as fast as they would otherwise.
Finally, with regards to residential properties, I'd expect population trends to change slowly.  Granted, rents are probably going to have to come down, or stay the same when unemployment goes up.  I don't expect a major hit.
So in summary, these are the rantings of someone who knows nothing, spent next to no time studying the situation and absolutely no track record.  I expect overall slower growth, and offices will take a significant beating, but there'll be an overshoot period where they'll represent a good buy.

When will it all end?

Today, I found myself asking when all this turmoil in the market will end.  It set me along the train of though that, the reason why credit is tight is because people are concerned with the viability of financial institutions.  Those financial institutions are on rocky grounds because the income they once enjoyed from securitization is gone and mortgages are defaulting, further hampering their revenues.  Of these two, I'd say that the shock from the first one should probably be over already.  The second one though, I don't think we're through the peak of the foreclosures yet.  Beyond that, I don't know what will happen.  I'd like to say that things will be over, but lets face it, some things lead, some things lag.  At this point, I'll say that would be step one.  After it becomes blatantly obvious that part of it is over, I'll start wildly stabbing in the dark about step two and hopefully one of a couple hundred guesses will be correct.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

End in sight for thousand li march

I don't recall how long ago this started, but I was just told that we now have roughly 6 weeks worth of overtime shifts to go.  It's nice because it's certainly leaving me feeling drained.  I would not like to do that on a continous basis.  At the same time though, I'm going to want the money.  It is a fairly decent chunk, probably about $400/month.  Then as I recall from what people told me, things usually slow a bit and then we start building inventory and run all out towards the start of spring.  So this will probably mean overtime will be available again for a good portion of next year.  I wonder how much of an impact doing overtime has on my estimates.  Though everything still feels so far off in the future right now, so it's hard to tell.

Saturday, September 13, 2008

You can't live life without any luxuries

In another one of my talks with various co-workers one of them told me about how he was contemplating buying a new HD tv. He told me that his concern wasn't so much the cost, but it was all the extras that were with it. You need the HDMI cables to get the most out of it, the bluray as well. Then there's the digital cable that will get you over and over again every month. It all adds up. The thing that struck me about it was not so much that I was having a casual conversation about money, but it made me realise something about myself. Life to me is not so much about the day to day things as it is about the bigger things. Most of my life has been about throwing all my resources at a single objective. I suppose this is easier done when you're young and haven't been out of school for too long. Homework kind of helps create a very focused life. For a while, things are very focused, specially around major deadlines and exams.
I'm not necessarily saying that it's a healthy way to live, but for now it's just the only way I know how to live my life. It has rather violent ups and downs. I don't think that this is the sort of life that leads to longevity, though I suppose that's something that can be sacrificed, like so many other things, to meet an objective.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Do I need to be a millionaire?

I keep wondering just how much money I need. Do I really need to be a millionaire soon? I think inflation will make it inevitable that I'll want to be a millionaire. Right now, it would be nice, but I think I'd be satisfied wit half that, or less. It's a bit of a milestone. I don't know how long I'm going to be staying at my current job. I kind of have goals for where I want to be when I leave, which reminds me, I have to bump things for inflation. It's still uncertain how my inheritance will change the picture. I've been trying to compute some estimates, but it's hard given that I do not expect the current market conditions to persist. The investments are also postured primarily in small resource exploration firms, which scare me. Most of the accounts also have substantial losses. I'm unsure of how to allocate blocks of money that large right now. There's still months of probate to go through though, so where the jumble lands is still up in the air. I just hope that there's still a good amount left when the dust settles since I get the feeling that many of those investments can fall by quite a bit.

Yay cost of living increase

I was going to write about something else today, but the long awaited cost of living increase finally came in. I got a $0.75, or 4.7% increase, which is roughly in line with local inflation. There was an article in the paper about how the average working wage has gone up about 4% this year. However my memory is a little foggy so I can't really say if I got more than the average, or less. While my increase is greater than 4%, I forget when the previous cost of living increase was. Though I'd be very surprised if it was exactly a year ago.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Old Emotions Coming Back

Now that I'm off the St John's Wort, I'm feeling a lot more anger and resentment lately. The same issues over again. It's no way to live, though now I'm in control. Drugging myself so that I can put up with people I can just leave behind feels kind of stupid to me.

Monday, September 8, 2008

Sheep, everyone, everywhere, sheep

Today, I can't help wondering if it's in our nature to view the bulk of the population as a herd of uneducated ignorant sheep. People seem to follow the same trends and hold the same views based on the same biased set of facts that they don't bother to truly learn about. For the most part, many of us live our lives going through the same cycle day by day, week by week. Many of us long for change or improvement. Few of us ever achieve much success at changing things. For the most part, we don't know how or we can't seem to bring ourselves to do it. Many of us just go on hoping that somehow through some wise shepherd we'll wind up where we want to be. As much as I want to be different, it's still too early for me to really feel confident that things will work. When its done, I'll now.

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Getting away from everything

Well, what to say, this week. Been yearning to get away and just break free from the normal routine of work and sleep with food sprinkled in between. I find myself asking several questions, about how much money is enough, and if I'll ever get to make my dreams come true. I don't think my odds are too bad. Somehow I've managed to boil down my desires to the essentials. When you ask little of the world, you'll find that you don't really need as much to have a good time, or so I hope. My efforts are also focused. This helps a lot. Many people can see the gourmet coffee, and focus on that with other things being but a dream.
Though still, I have my doubts, specially since things are really just beginning. While my rough calculations look good on paper, I can't overlook that each line on that page represents close to two years of my life. That's just the beginning.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Profit Share

One of the many things I perpetually gripe about at work is the profit share plan. Saw someone come in late today and he twalked about how he's been late so many tmies, he's cut out of the profit share now. This period stretches from about June to December. We're about half way through and he no longer has the additional incentive to help increase profits. He also made it a lot further than a lot of people. Many of them were out a month earlier. The amounts also aren't that significant in my eyes. The lowest paid workers get roughly an extra days pay for half a year's worth of hard work. The highest paid supervisors get about a week's pay. That's actually respectable, however that also means everyone else is getting much much less.
For now, the people who can change things are the people who are getting the most. I'm skeptical that they'd feel overly inclined to make changes to this arrangement.

Monday, September 1, 2008

The most important thing I have right now

I saw Kung Fu Panda today. It had me thinking, the most important thing I have right now is a body that can take me places. I might not be a marathon runner, but I like that I have the option of walking places instead of needing to rely on something else. Hiking in and out of the Muir Woods on vacation is something that'll be with me forever. It was also nice that I was able to keep up with everyone and keep moving while we all wandered through San Francisco enjoying the various sights. The fact that I'll one day loose this ability and there's little I can do about it is one of my greatest worries. I already have to think about the toll that my work takes on my body, which is quite sad, granted I've gotten a lot stronger lately. Right now, I'm kind of leaning towards not working on friday. Though that day is worth roughly $100. It's not pleasant to need to seriously think about my physical limitations.

The same question twice

I get the feeling that I'll be asked about working on Friday again, which has happened quite frequently. This time there's no overtime pay since it's going to be a shorter work week on account of the holiday. If I just assume that I naturally work Fridays now and by default have a 49 hour work week, the question I'd be asking myself is am I willing to give up 9 hours of pay to have someone else cover the shift for me. However if I assume that I work 40 hours by default and do not normally work Fridays, the question I ask myself is how much money will make it worth it for me to come in on Friday. This should be asking the same thing and I should wind up with the same result both times, either I work Friday in both situations or I do not work Friday in both situations. In practise, it doesn't quite seem to work that way though. I'm not sure I really want to or not next week when there's no overtime pay and thinking about the decision this way just makes things more confusing.

Poverty line

I now have a bit more information on where my bare minimum goal should be. I’m not sure why I didn’t look this up earlier, but I now know where the poverty line, more formally known as the low-income cut-offs, was two years ago.
It’s nice how it’s broken down by how big the family is and how big the population center is. There is a big leap for living in a place with more than a half million people. Bellow that, the differences aren’t that large. Personally, I kind of want to go for a smaller population and in the 100K-500K range, it says that I want $14,895 of after tax income in 2006. That’s still a long ways away, but 15K is quite a bit closer than 18K. Right now, I’m sitting at about 0.8K of investment income. While it’s a good start, it’s still just a start. Being about 1/20th of the way there really isn’t something to celebrate. I don’t want to spend 20 years of my life doing this. It should accelerate as my income increases through investing, though 3% increases really take time to make significant changes.
http://www.ccsd.ca/factsheets/economic_security/poverty/lico_06.htm
It’s interesting to note that if we assume that the after tax figures correspond exactly to the before tax figures, we can compute the tax rate. That brings me to the rather confused situation where the lower income figures seem to have a higher tax rate than the higher figures. Not entirely sure if that makes sense.

Saturday, August 30, 2008

What do I really want to count in my financial inventory?

Question of the day, do I want to reconsider whether or not I want to put money into real-estate investments? With my father passing away, I suddenly find myself running a real-estate holding firm. Granted, I still don't own any of it. Though once probate is done, real-estate investments will probably be well over 2/3rds of my net worth. The firm doesn't have a history of providing returns to shareholders, or repaying their interest free shareholder debt. While I may be handling the day to day aspects of the business, I do not have a controlling interest and I do not trust the other shareholders to sufficiently represent my interests on major decisions, such as payouts. This being a small firm, the shares are also completely illiquid. Do I really want to consider this when I decide on my asset allocation? It feels kind of silly. This is more like a part time job that I don't get paid for than an investment right now. Oh and with regards to that, my brother keeps telling me that I should put this on my resume. Somehow I don't feel it's really something to brag about right now. If I were to describe my accomplishments thus far, I managed to increase expenses by 30% without the company going broke in the first month. In a slightly more serious tone, I suppose I'd say that I started catching up with maintenance, and properly insured the one building in the firm. That probably puts it in a better light.

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Big Up Day In The Markets

Well that was quite a surprise when I got home today. Big market movements and I'm up nearly 5% in one day. That's over $1000 in my fledgling portfolio. Granted, there's down days as well and overall, it's hard to see the way things are heading from all the day to day ups and downs. Though it is easy to see that some things are considerably cheaper on some days.
The big thing I care about though is income and long term growth, which I then view as something I can convert into income. Q3 earnings are in. I haven't really reviewed my holdings yet, but that's on my to do list.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Topping off My Pay Cheque

Well, I've agreed to go for overtime two weeks in a row. By my calculations, this will give me roughly $250 more on that pay cheque. Regularly I get about $1000 for 8 days work, or about $125 a day. It feels kind of strange that comparing what I take home on average and the marginal rate, I don't feel like I'm making more on those extra days. Also kind of makes me wonder how many people think about marginal rates vs average rates. I wonder how many of the people I work with understand the idea of marginal tax rates well enough to make decisions based off them. I know there's some fairly financially uneducated people there. Though I also know that there's a bunch of fairly bright people there who just aren't fluent in english.

How Will Market Recoveries Affect My Plan?

This is something I find myself frequently asking. Right now, I'm enjoying the current situation. Stock prices are relatively low, yields are good and valuation is proving to be attractive. I certainly don't expect this situation to persist in the long run though. I kind of expect P/E multiples to increase again and yields to decline. On the other hand, I also expect short term earnings growth to increase though, which is not horridly meaningful while I'm saving. For the next several years, I still expect that the bulk of my gains will be from new money being introduced into my portfolio. Afterwards, I suspect that this will be little more than one of many blips in long term growth.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Do I Care More About My Cash Flows Or My Net Worth?

The interest rates on my loans float with the prime rate, however, the amount that I pay does not get adjusted. So, question of the moment, supposing the interest rate changes, how much do I care? Clearly I'm not completely indifferent about interest rate changes. For now I've gone heavy into equities and have done only the minimum for debt repayment. It's my general feeling right now that investments are going to have a greater return than debt repayment. Does this question really depend on how much free cash flow I have though? Again, it's hard to say. I've spent many hours trying to compute what would happen if I shifted more of my investments toward income again and used that money to invest. I also kind of have to reassure myself that going for net worth is the logical thing to do since I do have significant excess cash flow right now. It's a bit of a change from where I started.

Different perspective on yields and interest rates

While I was idly thinking about things at work one day, I came up with this simple idea. Why don't I stop thinking about interest in dollars and start thinking in terms of hours of work?
That lead me to 40hr x 3% = 1.2hr/year and eventually, I got to
100% of employment income = 1 year's pay/3% = 33 1/3 years
70% of employment income = .7/3% = 23 1/3 years
50% of employment income = .5/3% = 16 2/3 years
and in the last category, what I mean by 33 1/3, 23 1/3 and 16 2/3 years isn't that I'll need to work that long. I need to have the equivalent of that much money put away. Clearly this simplification does not include any investment growth or compounding of interest or that I won't be saving 100% of my income. So the point of all this math is that it looks interesting on screen. Whether you think in terms of dollars or how much hard work you put into getting them, the end calculation really doesn't tell you much. At least I sure hope I can get this all done and over with in less than 16 years.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

week in review

Well, It's the start of another workweek for me. I worry about being completely worn out by the end of it. It's kind of different having gotten so many things done during the weekend. I get paid this week, I'm looking forward to finding out how much I'm earning. This week, I think I have to resolve a few things going on with the rental property. Talk to the manager a bit, and figure out what's going on with regards to one of the leases that doesn't expire for a while. There's a proposal for an extension and an increase. I think the price is the important point in that and the terms less important as long as they don't change much. I'd like to standardize the leases. I suppose I'll push for waiting till we renegotiate the lease that is expiring and try to standardize the leases.
As for the expansion side, I suppose I should start looking into what to expand into. There's still a long way to go before that can go forward, but it never hurts to have more information.
On the personal side, I don't know what's on my to do list. It seems quite blank. Gotta move some money to my savings account once the hold clears, that isn't too exciting. I suppose most of my pay will be going into there as well. Maybe my only goal for now should be to simply sleep well.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

plotting the future of the family business

It's just another chaotic day. Wow that mall has a lot of issues. I'm only just discovering the extent to which maintenance has been neglected on the air conditioning units. It's also drastically under insured. Right now coverage is about half what it should be. The record keeping is also incredibly poor. It's something I would like to change. We were recently approached with a hand written note, something that supposedly resulted from a lease renewal negotiation that nobody knew about. I don't have a copy of anything. Things seem to be very old school.
If things were entirely up to me, I'd run the company more formally. Heck, I'd go wit three mandates, running more formally, expanding the business holdings and providing actual shareholder return. Right now we've been ignoring all the shareholders and well, it's been running at very modest gains, a lot of it going into repaying the mortgage. If things were entirely up to me, I'd expand first. Probably either get a franchise or a second property. Right now there's been little incentive to repay debts outstanding to shareholders. We're not on any repayment schedule and there hasn't been any interest payments. If we had to pay that at the same rate as the mortgage we'd have never made a profit. Taking more control would come second. I'd offer to exchange some of the outstanding foreign held shares into an interest bearing debt with a repayment schedule. Then if I think the company will support it, I'll try to clear the balance sheet of the zero interest, zero repayment share holder debt. It just doesn't feel right having that and not providing any return.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

I need a hug

I don't know why movies like that affect me so much, but I suspect that it highlights something that I'm missing in my life. Anyway, just finished watching Charlotte's Web and I need a hug.

Things not as they seem.

I found a note at work on Friday saying something about how they want to start the weekend shift up again next week and they want to hire ten people. That’s quite a lot for the size of our plant. Also, still no sign of the missing pay scale. I’d like to know what I’m earning instead of a vague, more than I was earlier. I suppose I just have to wait till next pay day.
As of yet, I’m not sure which of the shifts I like better. The last two hours makes a huge difference. Though I do love having four days off on weekends. Granted, everything is so pressed for time. I suppose I also like watching the markets on the weekdays. On weekends, I simply don’t know what to do. I guess it’s back to the old ‘I need a hobby’ line.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

whoo, got a raise

I now have the raise that I was waiting for. They took down the pay scale though so I'm not entirely sure how much I'm getting right now. It was a fairly decent jump, not like a token amount. Granted, this whole thing is still a joke compared to what I should be making. Overall, I'm not sure this really changes much. Keeping expenses down probably has more of an impact right now.
With regards to expenses, I'm not fond of the idea of blowing a month's wage on car insurance. Then there's maintenance and fuel on top of that. Granted the price of insurance should go down once I get some experience.
There's also the trip to europe that my brother wants me to take. I don't know if that's really such a good idea. I think I'll probably be happier with a bit more security in my life. It's a long road and I'm not getting close to the end yet.

Monday, August 4, 2008

As I go back to work, someone dear to me is now homeless, and also unemployed. I'm not sure how to handle this. I've had a friend in a bad spot before, but he seemed to have little trouble finding work. It was more keeping a job that was his problem. I'm not too sure how to handle this, though it does cause me rather considerable concern. Overall, I suppose this increases my concern over my own security and further impresses upon me the need to build resources quickly. Though in the short run, I suppose the thing to do is to grow my cash reserve. That seems to be the universal answer for any situation where I don't know what to do. Wait for information and build cash in the mean time. Then hope that it's not too late to act.

Sunday, August 3, 2008

Life goes on

Back to business as usual now. The investment property is under control again. The assets have been located and once we've got values for things, probating can begin. We also have to calculate capital gains though, which could take a while. On my to do list for today is catching up with July's accounting. This time, it's business. I've decided to just skip over my personal accounting for the month. There were too many transactions made that were split funny for me to really have the patience to deal with. Luckily for me, business does not really involve large numbers of odd transactions. I also had two software packages suggested to me by the accountant who's been handling my father's stuff, quick books and simply accounting. A review of those two packages is probably in order.

Monday, July 28, 2008

The Blade Liger

One of my most valuable lessons about money so far was actually taught to me by a toy. It was a blade liger that I bought on clearance at a Giant Tiger. It was only a few dollars, five, I think. I thought that having a few toys would help me regain some of my lost childhood. Though as I finished assembling the kit, I quickly realized that it was going to be little more than an ornament on my desk. A lot of stuff is simply junk and I see that a lot of the stuff I had as a child was simply junk.
On the other hand, some things are timeless. I still appreciate stuffed animals. They're soft and fuzzy and well, soft things are very nice for relaxing. They're also there when you need a hug, granted it takes larger ones now that I'm bigger. If it were all up to me, I'd probably bring my whole collection down from the closet and have everything in bed. People bug me about that though. When I'm around more understanding people, that's something I'll be doing.

Sunday, July 27, 2008

I'm 25 now

I really don't know what to say. I feel older now having been through so much lately. The loss of my father. Trying to drive again. My brother's efforts to pull the family back together. People like to tell me that I've matured a lot or seem more grown up, but I just simply feel older. I've just been doing the same things I always do to deal with things, only now I'm much worse at coping with stress than before. Nothing has really changed since I moved out, I'm just older. I wager I'll probably approach things the same way I did earlier when I'm on my own again. Maybe it's just that methodology works.
Anyway, I think I've gotten a half way decent start toward my goal of indefinite financial sustainability. That's something that I feel is getting somewhere, though I feel like I'm behind and trying to play catch up. According to one of the books my mom took out of the library, 40 years after the start of their working lives, 1% of people will become wealthy, 8% of people will gain financial independence. Of the ones that don't succeed, 14% will continue working because they need to, 24% did not survive 40 years of work and the remaining 53% will be broke. I'm not sure how accurate those figures are, but they certainly are sad. If we take out the 24% that don't make it, we're still left with about 12% succeeding, which is still saddening. Life just isn't fair.
I'm trying not to let the odds discourage me. There's no end to the number of stories I've heard about people getting burned by debt, or simply reckless spending. I'm sure that has something to do with it. Though it doesn't feel like it could possibly be the bulk of it. Oh well, I guess there isn't much to do but keep moving forward.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Well, it happens to everyone

I guess I was really expecting him to hang on a bit longer than that, but my dad passed away. One of my co-workers told me that it took him 25 years to get over the loss of his dad, though those were exceptional circumstances. I'm determined not to let this ruin my life now that I've started laying the foundation, or more correctly digging the big hole to lay the foundation in.
Bought some more as the markets dipped before he died, so kind of a light test of my emergency fund plan. I had a full pay cheque's worth of cash in my chequing account, immediately moved what I won't be needing into my savings account and I should still have a week's pay coming to me. Heh, things going down before I buy them was a new feeling for me. Things continuing downwards was nothing new, though the immediate feedback of loosing $100 of market value while adjusting my chair was new. Then I gained 60, so was down 40 while I was getting over the awe of something new. Never tried a direct access broker before and watching things day by day doesn't give a good feel for how much these things bounce minute by minute.
Anyway, fun time is over, and acquisition plans are on hold again. Time to sort out a lot of things. My dad's time in the hospital probably helped speed up the grieving process a bit. Most of my wild mood swings occurred while he was still alive. I haven't been too overwhelmed about it. The time also gave him the opportunity to see all his friends from far and wide one more time. All things considered, I think spending a month struggling for life probably isn't the way most people would rather go. My dad was always kind of stubborn though. He went out the same way he lived his life, refusing to compromise on what he wanted.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Rich Days

I hung out with people from work pretty much all day on friday. So much money going all over the place. By my counts, I spent about $10, and the other two spent $70 combined. Over all, I suppose that's not too bad. Though it does kind of pain me to see people complaining about there not being enough money when between the three of us, the tabacco and alcohol portion of cpi looks a little small. Though I suppose I know how hard it is to quit smoking. Seeing my dad trying to find cigarettes in the hospital was really something. The alcohol part I don't know about.
Anyway, if I had to move, I'm not sure if my lifestyle will be that compatible with theirs, though I suppose it would be near the top of my list of places.

Counting Down the Days

I'm told that it's only a matter of time before my dad goes. Went through his mail today. I hope if I'm in the hospital, people won't need to wonder if bills are paid. There are also so many investment accounts everywhere. I'm hoping to be able to sort out what's been dealt with and what needs to be dealt with. Jumping the gun feels strange, though there'll be even more of a mess if things aren't dealt with now.
Not sure where things go from here.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Time to face the music

Yesterday I was told that my parents had one of those end of life discussions with the doctor. This is the situation now, his kidneys aren't improving and there's a lot of dead and damaged heart tissue. Pulling out all the stops to keep him alive might not be the best idea anymore. He's going to be very frail and it's just time to make one of those quality of life decisions. I'm told that the next time something happens, they'll probably be able to save him, but the chance that his life will be nothing more than being hooked up to life support. Ultimately, it's his decision ot make and I suppose our role right now is to just let him know that we're ok with his decision, whatever that may be.
From what I figure, in all likelihood he'll be able to breath on his own in a week or so, hopefully. There's a question of what to do if he can't. I'm hoping that we won't need to address that.
The jist of it is this. It isn't about getting better anymore, it's about getting enough time to make peace with the world. I hope that includes passing down a few kind words.
From what my brother tells me, his girlfriend's grandmother was in a pretty bad spot too and the prevailing estimate was a few months, but she hung in there for a good 25+ years. So maybe.
One of his co-workers talked to us about how this wasn't fair. He worked so hard all his life and never got to enjoy retirement. He kept talking about going on a cruise around europe one day and never got around to it. When I've got my balance sheet squared off, I think I'll try to get a few things off my wish list before trying to be a contributing member of society again. For a while now, I've been thinking of going on a sailing trip to clear my mind and just give me the time I need to hopefully fix a few mental wounds. His thing was europe, as for me, I want to see both polar ice caps. I don't know why. People were bold enough to brave the poles with wooden ships and iron men, I hope I can do the same. I guess I need some adventure and a real sense of accomplishment. Then when I'm done, maybe I'll drop by Poland and tell everyone that I saw a lot of poles. Not sure how many side stops I want to make.
Oh and today is day four, tomorrow is day five.

Sunday, July 6, 2008

Still Upset

This happened back on July 1st, my brother called and asked me about my plans. It basically killed one and a half days right away. Then I stayed kind of obsessing over it. I know it's irrational, but being able to stop isn't easy. Changing thinking patterns is probably harder than quitting smoking.
He says that we need to reduce the amount of secrecy in our family. I don't know how to say that we simply don't trust each other. Working hard ten to twelve hours a day and being scolded for doing nothing is incredibly stressful and annoying. I can't see how they couldn't understand that.

Saturday, July 5, 2008

Finally Spent Something

Five days into the month and I finally buy something. Well, I bought two things, a slice of pizza and a cup. All together, $3.02. Tomorrow, I have to get groceries so that'll be more spending. I still wonder how often people buy things. Well, I've gone shopping once this month, and I guess I'll just keep counting. It's logged in my pda, but it's not in my computer yet. Oh and to continue with things, today's random number is 1326. I think I've biased the experiment already since I'm directly involved and I've largely bounded my responses already. I could be off completely and not know it.

Impending Disaster?

I saw an article in the paper today that jogged my memory about several other articles I read. There's a significant shift from defined benefit pension plans towards defined contribution plans. However as a population, the majority of us are rather ignorant about financial planning, investments, and retirement needs. There was a series of articles earlier about people's retirement expectations and much of it is a blur right now, but I recall one of them being about how many people felt that $10,000 was enough to retire on. I wonder how many of them were asked to take another guess. Anyway, as the current generation retires, which as I understand it is the last generation for most people to have a defined benefit pension, I can't help but feel some kind of impending doom as the first generation of mostly defined contribution pension plan retirees try to figure things out. This is still a good number of years away, but I wonder if there'll be any wide spread distress over this in the coming years.

Friday, July 4, 2008

General randomness

Today's random number is 1446. I have no idea how I got to that number, but hopefully it'll help me home in on my future financial freedom day. Ok, I'm actually estimating it based off my wage, market yields and estimated living expenses, but I have no methodology, I just pulled a number out of my head.
Anyway, I was having a little trouble with the market today. I found myself with only some of the data I usually get. Yes, it's the 4th of July and the US markets are closed, but I can't think of a decent reason why I don't see all the information I usually do on the Canadian markets. Yeah, that's my trouble with the markets today. I had trouble with access, no major losses or what not.
I also have a few predictions to make about the future. There are concerns about inflation and it seems to be getting a bit more news every time there's an interest rate announcement scheduled. I don't see interest rates going up nearly as quickly as they went down. That's going to be pinned down by fear of collapsing the economy. I hesitate to make a quantitative guess as to where interest rates will be a year from now. Maybe if I make a new guess each day for a week and take an average. That study really amuses me.

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Starting Two Things This Month

I started two things at the start of this month. One is counting work days. I have now completed two. Also, I just heard a strange study done that suggests taking an average of several guesses done over time is for some reason more accurate than the first guess. So, umm, today I happen to like 995 days till freedom, previous guesses were 1000, and 1500.
The other thing is recording all my transactions. While I haven't done anything yet, I can claim to have met my previous goal of starting at the beginning of this month since I haven't spent any money yet. Might go out and spend some money this weekend. Eyeing a deal on an mp3 player. Mine is from when DRM was marketed as a feature so it has annoying delays while converting whatever proprietary non-sense goes on in there to prevent copying stuff off. I also listen to a lot of audio books and being able to swap out my book so that I can listen to music is a plus and the one that I'm looking at supports external media. Granted, I could just simply carry both players and put music on one and books on the other.
Also, having trouble deciding what to put in my investment portfolio next. There are so many things I want to add, but it has to be spread out till I have enough to justify selling things during rebalancing rather than simply buying other things. Going to start a few scenarios of play money just to help me figure out what I want to get next.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Spoiled Day Off

I had a day off and all I wanted was to rest and reflect upon the question of who I wanted to impress and what sort of people I wanted to surround myself with. Though my brother called and asked me about my plans. It ruined my day.
He keeps giving me suggestions for "temporary" things I could do while I look for something better, however the things he suggests take several years of training. Last time I told him about something I was contemplating, optometry, he told me that I was wrong about the entry requirements and that I need to actually research things. So we repeated my search while I was there and found the information that I had presented him. There was also a time when a staffing firm called bowen came to town. He told me that Boeing was starting something here and that I should apply. His advice has been a lot of miss information and diverting my efforts into repeating things and attempting to convince everyone else that the information I had found was correct. It really pisses me off when my family tries to bring that up. If they didn't waste my time and drive me nuts, I very well might be engineering right now but since I was essentially dysfunctional for several months we'll never know.
I'm probably coming off as being a bit extreme in blaming them, but for several months I wasn't able to sleep, was feeling dizzy all the time, couldn't think straight. Then after people started leaving me alone, I slowly started getting better almost as mysteriously as it began. I'm convinced its stress related. Specially since they still cause an extraordinary level of stress in me.

Saturday, June 28, 2008

How Much Can I Draw From My Investment Portfolio

I was thinking about this question and somewhere I got an idea and decided to start searching mutual fund data.
Assumption 1: Index funds out perform most actively managed funds
Assumption 2: Index funds in general have much lower management expense ratios (MER) than actively managed funds
Therefore if I simply tossed all my money into index funds, I should be able to remove at least the difference in management fees to pay my own bills.
So I started by getting the top 10 balanced funds from morningstar's data. After removing funds that I didn't have MER data for and outliers, I was left with 7 funds. The remaining funds had an average annual rate of return over 5 years of 14% with an average MER of 2.086%, then my connection started having trouble.

Friday, June 27, 2008

Confusion

Not sure what to make of things right now. I suppose the chances of me becoming lost have gone up a bit. Trying to stick to my current goal of getting to a point where I don't need to work to make ends meet. It is still a long way away and it's threatened by more unknowns than before now. My dad looks as though he's not going to be able to go home for a while. My mind is strangely vacant when I'm not sure what I should be doing or what comes next. At least I'm not worried.
For the most part, I suppose I stick to life as it used to be for a while.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

plans change

Well, I started developing additional symptoms so I decided not to go in for overtime after all. I'm not the only one getting worse apparently, my dad is as well, and I got to see him today. Something feels strange about going out of my way to see someone who is sedated. I mean, you're not supposed to be aware during that, are you? Anyway tube everywhere, many panels of information.
In lighter news, I did some very rough calculations today and came up with a figure that says I'm probably about 1000-1500 working days from some kind of freedom. I kind of feel like starting a counter. Of course, that's still four to six years of work. That is still a very long way away.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Breaking Down

I am completely torn apart. Legs hurt, arms hurt, hands hurt. Also have a sore throat. It's hard for me to imagine that this is all due to work. I've worked long hours before and things weren't nearly so bad. Hopefully I'll feel better once the sore throat clears up. When I was on the weekend shift, I'd have days where it was hard to get out of bed in the morning. I'd be pain free by the time I got to work. I was stiff pretty much all day.
Anyway, major thought of the day, it's hard to believe that this is going to be the norm for a while. It isn't just a summer that'll end and let me move on to something else. This is going to drag on for a while.
Tentatively, I'm planning on going in for overtime on Friday if asked. Yeah, my body needs rest but I want to get this over with and I'd rather do over time when I'm not trekking through snow. Tuesday is a day off for Canada Day, I think. Maybe. If not, I am going to regret doing this. The weekend shift has a history of working through holidays, then again we had a weekend shift because we needed the extra production. Day and night shifts both get some holidays off. I'll ask when they ask me about overtime.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Yesterday's News-Internet Connection Down

It feels strange. I am so disconnected without my internet connection. Anyway, definitely feeling the results of too much work. It's hard to move and my muscles ache. I'm considering declining the likely request for overtime that'll probably come later this week. The money is tempting though
Getting more sleep will hopefully be a good thing for me.
Anyway, major thoughts for the day, I started trying to come up with some decisions regarding asset allocation. Basically, I started with if I had a half a million dollars and started going down from there. I made it to $100K before things really broke down. With a lot of things floating in the $20-$100 per share range, or the $2K-$10K per board lot range it started getting difficult to figure out how I'd allocate a $50K portfolio. Unless I want to deal with a mess of odd lots, purchases right now are in the range of 20% of my portfolio value. It almost seems nonsensical.
The other predominant thought that I had was that REITs sound like a good idea for down-turns. Corporations can suspend dividends, but REITs are obligated to pass on a large portion of their taxable income. Leases also tend to delay the effects of the down-turn. Places are also likely to trim hours or trim staff before trimming space. Like my work place for instance. Nobody has come by and partitioned off spaces that we're no-longer allowed to use, but we let go of a few people and cut our hours. We still occupy the same space. Ironically I seem to be working many more hours, the four hour difference in shift lengths plus some overtime.
I read that REIT guide that I found and now I know more about REITs than I had ever cared to know. I'm too tired to write a review now. Though I'll say that the first thing I do when I run into long PDFs is search for the word "recycled." It's kind of funny running into phrases like, "This report is printed on recycled paper," when you don't have a print copy. It doesn't contain the word recycled anywhere, for better or for worse.

Sunday, June 22, 2008

The 100 Li March

There's great wisdom in not marching 100 Li to gain a tactical advantage. It's now Sunday afternoon. I just got up from a badly needed nap and I wonder if I'm recovered enough to take on another week of work. Maybe there's still lifestyle changes to be made, I'm not sure. Work manages to drain a lot out of me, I'm not sure how long I'll be able to keep this up. Though I do have the option of rejecting that extra Friday shift.
One of my friend's is getting concerned about my health. Asked me to book a physical. I probably won't. Anyway stuff to do. Preserve the status quo.

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Shoes

I bought a pair of shoes for $30 three, maybe even four years ago. Quite possibly even five. Suffice to say a long time ago. People keep telling me that I can't just buy cheap stuff, good quality that'll last takes more money. Personally, I'm quite surprised that my shoes have made it this far. A supposedly decent pair of shoes would have cost me around $90-$120. To make a $90 pair of shoes really worth it, I'd be wearing them for what? Nine, ten, maybe fifteen or sixteen years. I'm not going to let shoes bother me, but I'll keep it in mind that I may need a new pair sometime in the future.

REIT Selection PT 1

Well, lets see what I can come up with before reading the REIT guide that I found. So, how do I pick what a good investment will be? Well, it's got to provide a good sustainable return. I guess that breaks things down into two main points, sustainability and return. I don't decide what to buy based of geographical and sector concentrations, but that might weigh in on how much I buy.
What can harm sustainability? From what I've seen REITs are always issuing new units, so dilution is a factor. Then there's how well properties are maintained and whether or not there's new ones in the works. So I guess acquisitions is another thing that I would look at. Another thing that hurts sustainability is that some REITs seem preoccupied with paying out a certain rate. While they're obligated to pay out a certain amount of taxable revenues to unit holders, nothing prohibits them from paying out more. So pay out ratio is another big one. I guess if something is sustainable, it's probably also growing. If it were unsustainable, it would be shrinking and hitting the exact point where it isn't doing either sounds like something that's unlikely to occur.
I suppose value is best summarized in some variation of PEG ratios. They tend to use some slightly different terminology when talking about REITs.
So bit of a summary:
Sustainability and growth
-units issued
-recent acquisitions
-payout ratio
Value
-PEGish thing
Now to read the guide and see if I can refine my ideas further and possibly come up with a comparison table It's a bit of a long document.
Also note, while typing on this laptop, part of me wonders how much smaller the keyboard can get before I have to learn to type again. That shouldn't be much of a concern for someone who can do like 30WPM on a graphing calculator, but relearning typing is an inconvenience. My old machines should probably hold out till there's more competition in the sub notebook market and I can find something that'll suit my style. Hopefully there won't be so much of a trade off too.

My Situation is Different

I just woke up from a rather insulting dream. I was at a party with an old friend and everyone there had important sounding jobs. It felt like they were rubbing it in that I wasn't important. When I woke up, I figured out why very quickly. I left an audio book playing full of stories about people who let their parents sabotage their life.
I hope I'm not just in denial, but my situation is different. I'm independent and strong. What makes me different is that I'm just here because it lets me build up wealth quicker. Maybe it'll be easier to illustrate this once I get back to my regular accounting by the end of the month, which is creeping up quickly. I am indeed building up wealth. At this point, I'll estimate that I'm saving roughly 75% of my after tax income. Now to prove that
Anyway, I've decided that their opinion doesn't matter to me, which is why I quit talking to them about my future. That's going to be harder to pull off than just making a decision. I can also appreciate what I'm capable of, I just don't have much of an idea of what I want to do at this point.
My dad says that I'm completely insane for considering become a doctor. Not going to let that dictate what my options are. At the same time, I'm not going to let myself gravitate towards that simply to prove him wrong. Getting an MD shouldn't be an academic exercise, specially with the healthcare needs today, I shouldn't be displacing someone else's spot if I'm not going to be in for the long haul. That should be a long rant for another post, not a side discussion in this one.
Separating what I want from the general conflict between me and my parents is going to be a tough challenge. I'm trying to make a decision based off emotional appeal, but eventually, making a list and scoring options based off whatever criteria I decide will be important to me might be my best option. It doesn't feel right making a decision of this type using that method.
I'm not sure whether or not I've calmed down or gotten even more worked up after writing this. One day things are going to change. For now though it seems to be in my best interest to maintain the status quo. I need money to invest in my future. I've also managed to increase my income a bit. The past two weeks my employer has asked me to do some overtime. Absolutely huge list of securities I want to get. Then again, with share prices typically ranging from roughly $20-$70 or so, three or four becomes a rather prohibitive list for acquisition.

Friday, June 20, 2008

I keep hearing...

I keep hearing about how expensive restaurants are but the way I see things, they seem rather cheap. It's an age where it's hard to find a home for less than a quarter million dollars, and at first glance it seems like there's a somewhat decent selection of restaurants available for less than that...
Yeah, I know that when people talk about restaurants being expensive, they mean that eating out there is expensive. I'm not all that interested in restaurants, well maybe a fast food franchise. Anyway, one of the things I'm considering doing in the future is buying a small company. Likely a fast food franchise with a big thick instruction book that will ensure smooth, simple operation. I think it's something that I'd like to pursue. For a while anyway...
In general, I don't think I'd want to sell my investment portfolio to buy a company. Though at this point, I think I'd be hard pressed not to keep a substantial investment portfolio once it's established. If I were to go down this route, I think I'd work a bit longer and make some decisions on what I'd like to sell.