January 2015 update

Wow! It’s already the end of the first month of 2015. Time flies! I’ve been pretty busy learning my new job and, as such, I didn’t have much time neither much energy to maintain and update my several blogs and I hope to find more time in february but I doubt it. This new job is dragging all my attention an energy and I also try to go the gym at least 3 times a week since I look like a pig!

I’m a tall guy but 235 pounds is way too much… I became vegan last fall and I had to adapt to my new way of feeding myself. I was a huge meat eater and for a while, I have compensated with pastas and pizzas… bad bad bad… but I’m slowly finding my balance.

Vegans usually look healthier and more thin than meat eater but for me, it’s going the wrong way. Without meat, I often felt empty so I hate twice as much…

I will have to workout like crazy to be thin again. 205-210 pounds sounds like a good plan and I hope to get there by the beginning of summertime.

Dividend income update

Over the course of january I bought my first 24 shares of TD bank and added 45,12$ to my annual dividend income.

My forward dividend income now stands at 687,56$ US and 376,94$ CAN for a rough total of 1064,50$ (this hypothesis considers that 1$US equals 1$ CAN for a matter of simplicity).

I have received a total of 53,34$ CAN in dividends over the course of january.

I still don’t know what’s going to happen with ARCP’s dividend so I put it at zero. Mattel is also another stock I’ll have to keep an eye on. It’s last report was a total disaster. They have replaced the CEO but I’m losing faith. I’m wondering if I should take a loss there while the exchange rate is high. This would offset my loss and I could reinvest elsewhere… Food for thoughts I guess.

The CAN/US exchange rate is really becoming prohibitive these days… Having to deal with the exchange rate adds an extra risk to my strategy as all of the most interesting dividend growth stocks are mostly in the US and I live and get paid in Canada with Canadian money.

I can see the impact of this risk right now. If I would be retired, it would currently work to my advantage as I would get 1,25$ for every US dividend dollars I would receive. Not bad! But since I’m the accumulation phase, it’s not that good for me right now.

In Canada, many of the dividend growth stocks are currently sold at prohibitive prices too so I’ll see what I do. I might end up just keeping a lot of cash until more favorable opportunities arise or I might allocate money at the best place for the current times. I like TD and other Canadian banks right now…

I’m not sure yet if I will buy stocks over the course of february anyways as I have decided to pay a gym subscription in one instalment (this was a necessity as I’m getting fat) plus I had some repairs to pay on my car and I will also have to buy new clothes for my new job… I might also decide to upgrade the flooring of my house. I will do it by myself as I usually do when I have home improvements to do but I expect a +/-2000$ expense at least.

It is not a mandatory expense and I could postpone it as I did since I bought the house but the floors have been installed in 1979 and their lifespan is… over. They are ugly, scratched and make my house look pretty bad. At the same time I will upgrade the heating system and thermostats since they were installed in 1979 too… well they look as if it was the case at least and I plan to have a baby over the course of 2015 so I need to both secure my house and also plan less free time to do home improvements. So the more I do before my GF gets pregnant, the better it is.

Online income

During the december vacations, I have written more than 20 posts using long tail keywords related to the personal finance theme. It seems that these already started to show some impact as my natural search engine traffic grew over the last month and my total traffic grew again this month by 9,25% on QuitYourDayJob101.

I’d really like to see my monthly online income grow to at least a 100$ per month as soon as possible but this will require some extra work for sure. I really would like to start an Amazon affiliate website too but I can’t see how I’ll get the time to do that in the near future… This new job is vampirizing me…

For january, I made 19,43$ from Adsense, down more than 33% from last month… ouchh… That sucks but since my traffic grew I guess there is also some “luck” related to that income since I don’t know which ads show up and I can’t control the clicks either. Anyways, 20$ for doing almost nothing is not that bad! I just wrote two small posts and answered some comments.

I had no sales with Amazons, Clickbank and other affiliate programs I have subscribed too.

Overall, it was a pretty calm month but I’m glad to see that the traffic grew.

My Alexa ranking is showing signs of declines but I got more backlinks to my website which is great.

So… that’s it for this month!

 

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / Freedigitalphotos.net