2018 Review and Thoughts

Hey everyone, I hope you had a wonderful Christmas with your friends and family. We sure did, although it tends to always be a busy time of the year. Our kids got spoiled by everyone, and even got money towards their 2019 RESP contributions. Got to love that!

Unfortunately I’m a little behind on my posting schedule. With the holiday season in full force I kind of put it on the back burner.

Our family has been battling various flu’s on and off for almost a month now. Of course our son probably brought it back from school one day and it makes the rounds to all of us. (Luckily not our 11 month old) It seriously is getting frustrating. Right when you think its gone boom! Its 2am and there’s puke all over our sons bed. We all got our flu shots, but the doctor even mentioned how bad of a year this is for the flu.

Hopefully this will pass by new years and we can go to our friend’s to drink and ring in 2019! With the start of 2019 approaching its a good idea to look back and evaluate how you did on your goals for 2018

2018 Goal Review

• Create a Will – Fail…. We still need to do this…..
• Hit The Weights — I have been throwing weights around the last couple weeks, so that’s good. But really I haven’t been consistent. Ill give it a orange for at least starting again.
  
• Diet – Pass. We have definitely made a improvement to our diet this year, adding a lot more vegetables to our meals and eliminating more bread.
• 10,000 Page Views – Fail. The site never got to 10,000 page views in a month. I’m actually ok with this though as the progress has been pretty consistent. PassiveCanadianIncome.ca now brings in roughly 6-7k views a month and the bounce rate has improved quite a bit.
• Dividend Growth – Focus on Buying better dividend growth stocks. Id say we did pretty well in this regard. The portfolio has gotten quite a bit more blue chip stocks in it now.
• Budgeting – Fail…. Yup failed this one for sure. Haven’t done one this year. We just focus on paying ourselves first.
• Bump Passive Income up to 15k – Well technically we failed, as we will be around 14k but that’s a massive improvement year over year. I might of set the goal to high with the wife on mat leave.
• Start a RESP account for our Daughter – Pass. We combined both our son and hers into a family resp plan.
• 10% Increase In Salary – Nope, I did get a 5% increase though, so not bad…
• Fix Credit Report – Earlier this year I noticed we had a error on our credit report, a couple of calls and now it is removed. Definitely keep an eye on your credit report.
• Finish Vegetable Garden – Well this one didn’t get finished. I ran our of patio slabs and refuse to buy them, since we get them at work all the time. The gardens are all framed with 4×4’s, filled and got drip lines setup so not that bad. Just the paths are a little messy.

Overall I feel we did pretty well with our goals, of course some things could of been improved. The will and budget are bad though. I could of at least made a attempt to do them. If your Canadian and have a will did you go with a lawyer or legal wills.ca or something like that? With the new year approaching it will be time to make a new list and hold myself to a higher accountability to get them done.

Market Thoughts

This market is interesting ain’t it? One day its a huge drop the next a big gain. The us stocks pull back and the tsx rallies and vice versa… Our portfolio is officially down 10% now, which really isn’t that bad. I think its because we are pretty high on the utility sector. Although energy and financials are my next 2 sectors and they have been getting beat down.

I really do have mixed feelings seeing all the red. Sure it sucks, I’m a horrible investor etc etc. (that mental game) But you got to love adding to positions in your portfolio while they are in the red… Yields are higher, your dollar cost averaging down and it just feels good buying stock cheaper! Hopefully you even drip a extra share or two.

There tends to be a lot of good deals out there now. I know for me personally I had emails coming left right and center from notifications of stocks hitting target prices I set on them. Unfortunately I don’t sit on much cash, and if I did I would of probably put it to work the week before.

This pullback could be very good for the market though. I know I have a good friend who now just started a quest trade account because he thinks its a good time to start investing. Everyone has talked about how long this bull-run has been going on and needs a correction etc etc, well now they can get over that. If Trump and China work out a better tariff deal we could really see the market rally now. Of course it could keep going lower. I got no crystal ball. Unemployment everywhere is so low, so it seems the economy is doing well. If that’s the case I don’t mind the market declining.

I think interest rates will continue to go up, but at a slower pace. It seems they need to do that, so when things go bad they can stimulate the economy with lower rates. Luckily I read a article earlier today stating Canadian’s #1 goal for 2019 is to pay down their debt. I really hope Canadian’s do, as we carry a tonne of debt.

Real Estate

At the beginning of the month I wrote a post about possibly getting into real estate for our 7th source of income. After talking to a bunch of people who are already pretty successful with real estate, we have decided to not go that route at the moment. The general consensus was where we were looking at buying a property is to far away. I thought it would be doable, but these are the “pros” to me, so I will gladly take their advice. We still have lots of room in our tfsa and rrsp accounts at the moment, so we will continue working on those. If real estate becomes a cheaper option as interest rates rise, we will reevaluate it in the future.

Conclusion

Overall another great year all across the board. Some goals I should of worked harder on, some I just should of done! Yup that will.. Why do most people put it off to the side, when we all know we are gonna die… Clearly this will make it to my 2019 goals, and I WILL do it. As for the market, for me its nice to see. I got another 20+ years before I really need these investments and higher yields and cheaper drips sounds great! There are no threats of wars or anything, things look good. Now if we could find a solution for plastic, things would be even better.

Or we need the prince of Atlantis to dump all our garbage in the ocean back onto the land, like in Aquaman! (btw it was a good movie)

Anyways hope you all had a great Christmas, and 2018 in General. Enjoy the cheaper prices of the markets and we will see you again in 2019!

Happy New Years,

Cheers!

Rob

Hey I’m Rob, creator of Passive Canadian Income.

In 2011 me and my wife had almost $60,000 in debt and a negative $7,000 Net Worth. Through hard work and financial education we paid all that off. Now we are focusing on increasing our Passive Income Streams to make the money work for us. Feel Free to Follow along the Journey by clicking the Social Media links below or subscribing to get notified of new posts on the sidebar.