A Little About Myself

A Little About Myself

Hey and welcome to the site. I thought I would write a little bit about myself, so you would get a good picture that we are just your average family.

I’m Rob a 38 year old male and married to my wonderful wife. We have a 8 year old son, a 3 year old daughter and a dog living in Ontario Canada.

I’m  a Landscaper and she’s in the health care field. Our household income is probably average for a dual income family. I’m a true Maple Leaf and Blue Jays fan and a bandwagon jumper with the Raptors. They got a good team I just cant watch basketball, playing it is fun tho.

Growing up both our parents didn’t really talk to much about finances with us and we came out of school with a bunch of debt and not much savings. Hey we were normal right? Our financial situation changed when we started questioning ourselves? What are we doing? Working so hard just to pay bills and these debts with no savings in sight.

Debt

In march 2011 I started reading about finances and got convinced to pay off all our debts. At the time we were just over 60k in debt with minimum payments totalling approximately $1600 (not including house). We had a net worth of negative 7k. Yes you did read that right -7K…… We owned a house at that time as well. Both of us did the Dave Ramsey system and after 2 years, WE WERE DEBT FREE!

At the time we were kid free and we decided to just take the extra hours at work and I would even do some landscape side jobs on the weekend. We loved filling out that debt snowball form every month and seeing certain debts decline or better yet get eliminated.

I continue to read a lot of  finance and business books. Feel free to check out my book recommendations as I will be updating it periodically. If you have a book that you would recommend let me know and I will do my best to check it out.

Precious Metals

Between now and the time we were debt free I was really under the belief that the financial system was going to somewhat implode, as they kept printing money. So I wasn’t into the stocks yet. We bought physical precious metals monthly. I remember buying some silver the day the U.S. assassinated Osama Bin Laden. The next day precious metals plummeted. That was a eye opener and I realized as much as I liked the physical aspect of it, there was no return on investment. It’s a great hedge, but there is no Cash flow!

We want to make money while we are sleeping not look at pretty objects…

Dividend Stocks

We have been buying dividend stocks for a couple years now and placing them into our TFSA, RRSP and RESP Accounts. You can see our portfolio here.

I love owning a part of these fantastic companies, and its even better when we regularly purchase their products. In return for purchasing shares of their stock, dividend companies give us a cut of their profits in the form of dividend payments. Cash flow, money while we sleep funds. We tend to reinvest the money into new shares to grow that income faster. By buying quality dividend companies our money starts to work hard for us and one day hopefully harder than us!

The Website

I created Passive Canadian Income after reading other bloggers changing their financial picture for about a year. They inspired me to get investing and by having this website, it motivates us more to improve our finances, grow as well as learn and hopefully inspire some of you viewers. We are just a normal family who decided enough is enough. We worked hard for so long and really had nothing to show for it. We were still broke and needed that pay cheque every week to stay afloat. It took awhile to get the ball rolling, but month by month things get easier.

Conclusion

I hope you take something from across the site and implement it, the sooner you start the better. I wish you all the best. If you have any questions or comments. Leave a comment or email me, I’d love to help you or improve myself or the website in any way I can.

Cheers!